Read Online Lifelines: Kate's Story by Vanessa Grant - Free Book Online

David’s tidy writing. Research
papers, notes. David’s old 486 computer.
    She
walked to the nearest box and unfolded the interlinked flaps that held it
closed. The dishes she’d bought the year they moved into the house. Flowers
painted on stoneware. David didn’t like them, and for Christmas he bought her
pale china with delicate roses woven around the edges. Elegant.
    “Recycling
depot,” she muttered. She folded the lid closed and lugged the box of cheap
dishes to the entrance. She should hire someone to haul everything to the
Salvation Army store.
    Socrates
appeared at the entrance to the garage and glared at her.
    “As
if I’d lost my mind,” she muttered.
    Three
boxes of papers from David’s university studies, packed before she met him. She
couldn’t face them today. Last night, at the motel, she’d abandoned both
Socrates and David’s ghost. Free of the weight, she’d slept hours without
interruption. She could run away again, drive south to Bellingham and visit her
mother, ask her about the ten-thousand-dollar check.  Mom, your neighbor
called. She’s worried ... I’m worried ...
    If
Jennifer were here, they could share the job, a mother-and-daughter bonding
day. Except Jen didn’t want to be around her mother, and—shit! Stop crying!
    For
Christ’s sake, Kate.
    Another
pile: stuff to look at later.
    Jennifer’s
high school papers: math assignments, an essay about pollution in Puget Sound.
Halfway through Jen's papers, she stopped. A mother had no right to decide the
fate of her child’s possessions. 
    By
the time the light in the garage turned pink with day’s end, she’d amassed a
waist-high barrier of boxes at the front of the garage. Monday, she would call
the bookstore and the recycling depot.
    Only
one row of boxes left. She turned on the interior garage lights to counteract
growing shadows, felt hungry and couldn’t remember the last time she craved
food.  Just a few more boxes. The northeast corner looked like a good place to
create a pottery studio, but she couldn’t visualize it properly until she
emptied the corner.
    Studio
... a good word.
    She
had this sorting business down to a science now. She gave Socrates’ head a
dog-pat. She’d forgotten all about him the last couple of hours, and he’d spent
all afternoon patiently watching.
    One
after another, she allocated three boxes to recycling: old towels and linen,
packed away the year Jennifer turned twelve and David hired a contractor to
paint the bedrooms and bathroom. She’d wanted to do the painting herself, but
David insisted on a professional.
    Just
one more box, a big one. Inside, she found the papers and albums from high
school days. She flipped open the first album and stared at a picture of the
veterinary clinic in Anchorage, walls framed and roof half-shingled. A
sixteen-year-old Kate—her father always called her Katie—sat astride one end of
the peaked roof. Dad faced her from fifteen feet away, also astride. Katie’s
hammer was on the upswing, his idle. Who had taken the picture? Not her mother,
who claimed construction sites were unfit for women.
    In
the picture, Dad wore a smile.
    They’d
put the roof on in July, two carefree weeks before her accident, a month before
she was discharged from hospital and driven to the airport by her brooding
father.
    She
never saw him again. Evelyn claimed Kate’s carelessness destroyed everything.
Kate hadn’t understood then and still couldn’t make sense of it. She’d lost her
father, then Michael, and now David.
    She’d
come to terms with Michael—her fault, and after all these years she’d achieved
acceptance and maybe eighty percent self-forgiveness. She didn’t know when she
would find acceptance for David’s early death, but her intellect understood a
faulty heart was no one’s fault. But her father ... all these years and she still
didn’t know why her father sent his family away, and what it had to do with
teenage Katie’s industrial