Read Online Fear Itself by Duffy Prendergast - Free Book Online Page B

we’re in the grocery store. And then he told me he was my Uncle Henry and that he was just teasing about being my daddy. And he drank coffee with no sugar in it…” she grimaced, “and he talked about before when mommy took care of his wife, when she was sick, and then she died, and then mommy didn’t come over after that. And Uncle Henry is old and he has hair growing out of his ears.”
    “Older than me?” I had to interrupt. “Way older.” Her eyes got big and she giggled, “He’s got white hair and wrinkles and hair sticks out of his nose too.”
    I pulled Sarah too my chest again. I was so hurt. Catherine had had an affair. She had been with someone else. She had loved someone else. I felt so betrayed; so wronged. I wanted to die at that moment. I clutched Sarah to my chest as I slid down on the couch and I sobbed out loud.
    “Are you crying because of Uncle
    Henry?”
    “No baby, I’m crying because I miss mommy.” I lied. The truth was that I did wish that Catherine were there at that moment so that I could scream at her; so that I could interrogate her; so that I could inflict verbal injury upon her. I screamed inside of my head “Why! Why? Why did you do this to me?”
    And, finally out loud, “Why!” “Why what daddy?”
    “Nothing honey.” I shook my head and buried my face in my hand.
    Sarah lifted up from my grip and smiled and flared her eyebrows, “Okay, lover!” she giggled, and through my tears and pain, so did I.
    * * *
    Later that evening, while I was alone, after Sarah had gone to sleep, as I was rummaging through some papers in Catherine’s desk (in a corner of our semi-finished basement), I pieced things together. Henry, I remembered, was one of Sarah’s clients. Or rather his wife was her client. Henry’s wife was a terminal cancer patient who had contracted skin cancer on her upper lip but despite her late age (she was almost sixty at the time) she had vainly refused treatment because she knew that the proposed surgery would have blemished her beauty. The cancer eventually spread and metastasized to her brain and Catherine was employed as her visiting nurse during the later stages of her illness. Catherine fed her and comforted her and changed her diapers and performed other menial tasks until the day she died. The woman, Lenore was her name, refused to go to a hospital and made Henry promise to let her die at home. Catherine quit that job after Lenore’s death. She said that she couldn’t stand the heartache of befriending people knowing that they would soon pass away. It was just too much for her emotionally. And shortly thereafter Catherine discovered that she had become pregnant with Sarah and her career became a moot issue.
    I sifted through all kinds of papers on top of and inside of Catherine’s desk including medical bills and unfilled prescriptions and grocery lists; every odd thing. I got lost in the memories of some of the photographs I found and I became particularly distracted when I came across a pendant that I had given Catherine on the day after our first kiss. The morning after our kiss I woke up early and rode my bicycle all the way up to St. Clair Avenue to a pawn shop that I had passed many times but had never entered. I remembered my mother going there to hock her engagement ring once to buy groceries. I walked in with the almost twenty dollars I’d saved from delivering news-papers and I picked out a Beautiful necklace. As it turned out the necklace I chose cost over three-hundred dollars. The clerk laughed when I pulled out twenty odd dollars in single dollar bills and change and then directed me to some necklaces in my price range. I settled for diamond chips instead of diamonds but I think the clerk still gave me a generous deal.
    I got a little choked up and began to cry. I had forgotten that I had given the necklace to Catherine. I was touched that she had thought to keep it. I found it in a lower drawer in a little white box accompanied by the