Read Online Children in the Morning by Anne Emery - Free Book Online

which was painted a pretty colour of green with all the 36

    ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 37
    other stuff white or blue. But best of all was the bunk beds.
    I said: “I always wanted a bunk bed!”
    “Yeah, but you don’t have enough kids in your house. You can’t fill up the rooms like we can. You have to be in a different room from your big brother.”
    “I know. But now that we have Dominic maybe he can have a bunk bed with me, when he’s big enough to get out of his crib.”
    “Maybe. Or you should get more kids. Girls.”
    “I wish.”
    “So, what do you want to play? Dolls? Or hockey?”
    “We can play hockey here?”
    “It’s a big game that you put on a table. It’s down the basement.
    Laurence is probably playing with it.”
    “Oh, can I see it?”
    “Yeah. Let’s go.”
    So we went to the kitchen and to the top of the basement stairs.
    Jenny said to be careful. “That’s where Mummy fell down and died.”
    So we didn’t run, but they were just ordinary stairs made of wood.
    There was a little table near the bottom with a jug full of flowers and cards the kids had made, all for their mum, saying how much they loved and missed her. I felt tears coming into my eyes.
    “It’s really awful when your mum dies,” Jenny said. “You wake up crying and wanting her to be there but she never is. Never. And your mum is the only person, except for your dad, that loves you no matter how many dumb or bad things you do. She loves you no matter what, and forever. Nobody else does that, except maybe when you grow up and get married. But even then, it doesn’t always work. Your husband may beat you up. So, anyway, that’s gone. I hope it doesn’t happen to you, Normie. But Daddy says she is still with us, looking over us like a guardian angel. He says dead people aren’t way up high in heaven; heaven is down here too, so dead parents and kids and the saints and angels are really all around us. So it makes me feel a bit better knowing she’s here even if we can’t see her.”
    “Your dad must be really lonesome for your mum.”
    “Yeah, he is. Sometimes he talks to her. ‘Peg! Will you do something about these kids? They won’t listen to me!’ And maybe she’s working behind the scenes because we usually settle down when he 37

    ChildrenintheMorning_final_Layout 1 2/1/10 1:37 PM Page 38
    does that. They really loved each other,” Jenny said, “and they hardly ever had a fight.”
    “They never had a fight!” That was Laurence. He came over from wherever he had been in the basement.
    “I don’t mean a fight, Laurence, hitting each other and all that like they did in my old house.”
    “Yeah, Jenny’s old family where she lived before, they fought all the time, with their fists and their feet. She was really little but she remembers because it was so bad.”
    “And they used to hit each other with beer bottles!” Jenny added.
    “But our mum and dad here, Laurence’s and mine, never did that.
    They just argued sometimes. Especially about Corbett. Here’s the hockey game.”
    It was humongous! It was a whole rink with pretend ice. It was white and it was on a big table. There were all these little hockey players that you could move with levers. One team was blue and white with a maple leaf on their uniform, and the other was red and white, with a big C.
    Jenny pointed to one of the C sweaters. “Daddy calls that la sainte flannelle . It means the holy flannel, because this team, the Canadiens , are so holy in Montreal. And the other guys are the Toronto Maple Leafs.”
    “Wow! This is great. My dad used to play hockey, but he says he wasn’t anywhere near the best player on the team. Let’s play a game!”
    “We can’t. It’s busted,” Laurence said. “I’m trying to fix it.”
    “Okay. Come on, Normie. We’ll do something else.” So we left the hockey rink. Jenny said: “The boys always end up breaking it.
    They’re too rough with it! But we can have a