Read Online The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen - Free Book Online Page B

of college, for starters. Smaller things, too: nice clothes to fit Mama’s new, larger body instead of just Walmart sweatpants; that pair of tan and turquoise boots Illa saw in the display window of Buck’s; a real nurse to help Mama so that Illa could move into the college dorms next year. But Mama refuses to touch the money, claiming she let Sands buy her too easy.
    About a year after the explosion, around the time when Mama, under pressure from her lawyer, settled with Sands, she was arrested for trespassing on refinery property. Furious and regretful over the settlement, wanting to make some kind of statement, she’d called the paper, then wheeled herself two miles to the refinery docks and started ranting that Sands got away with murder, that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fine was a joke, and that Beau Putnam and the rest of the Dallas suits should go to criminal court for gross negligence.

    After the arrest and the story in the paper, people started calling Illa and her mother the Strange Starks. It didn’t help Mama’s case that some folks in town viewed Beau as a hero for pulling people, including Mama, out of the wreckage before the first responders arrived. The Port Sabine Flare ran a front-page photograph of him cradling her like a bridegroom, emerging from behind a curtain of smoke and flame. Refinery manager Beau Putnam pulls his secretary, Meg Stark, to safety. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Chemical Safety Board and internal reports cited only “organizational failings.” OSHA handed down the largest fine in its history, but Mama said it was pennies to Sands, which pulled in billions every year; that of course they would go on pumping oil in a death trap, when forty-seven lives could be bought that cheap.
    Illa has failed to convince Mama many times that they needed the settlement money, so every Friday, she pockets her twenty-dollar allowance and tries to adjust her dreams to fit reality. After graduation, maybe she can get a part-time secretarial job, leave the house for a while each day, and earn some extra cash. Maybe she can scrape together enough to rent one of those sagging Craftsman cottages off the downtown strip so at least she’ll have some time alone, eight or nine hours to pretend she has a life of her own.
    Illa slides the window shut and latches it. With the air smelling perpetually of rotten eggs, it’s easy to attribute the new odor in the house to some refinery project. But whenever Mama wheels past her, Illa has to hold her breath against the stench, which doesn’t waft in Mama’s wake so much as knock into Illa’s nostrils like a swift uppercut, a dense mix of sweat and piss that reminds Illa of the Salvation Army men’s shelter on Rangeline, or the backyard petting zoo in Orange that Mama took her to once when she was too small to be put off by stink or by small, mangy farm animals kept in cages. Back when she and Mama still spent time together. Back when Mama still left the house.
    Illa hasn’t been able to bring herself to ask her mother what’s wrong, because it frightens her to consider the possibilities in any detail. From Mama, she has learned that so much can go wrong with a body. Pushing the wheelchair, doing errands, driving Mama to her doctors’ appointments, even trimming toenails—these are tasks Illa has grown accustomed to. She has not, however, seen her mother’s naked body, even when it was beautiful: a courtesy every parent owes a child, in Illa’s opinion. But the violent new funk trailing behind Mama threatens to breach this last remaining boundary of decorum. Either Mama can no longer bathe herself or she’s lost the will to, meaning Illa will have to intervene.

    Illa pulls on a pair of jeans, noting with satisfaction that they seem looser this week. The jeans are already a size zero. What if she shrinks below that? Is there a size subzero, a denim