Read Online Under the Bridge by Rebecca Godfrey, Ellen R. Sasahara, Felicity Don - Free Book Online Page B

Oaks. She might have felt distressed and lonely, for Seven Oaks was a bleak and desperate place. Not as bleak as Kiwanis. Kiwanis—the only good thing about that place was she met Dusty. She remembered Reena trying to tag along with her and Dusty, and trying to impress them both by telling them she had a probation officer. “For fuck’s sake, Reena, you can’t have a PO if you’ve never been arrested,” Dusty said, and Reena looked so hurt and surprised.
    â€œLeave us alone, Reena!” Dusty screamed.
    When Dusty took off and disappeared, Josephine had been sad, for Dusty had the makings of a good sidekick. She knew from her studies of Gotti lore that the best sidekicks were faithful and volatile and heavy-set. Where was Dusty now? Maybe she was in jail but girls didn’t usually go to jail for more than a month. If she still had her address book, she could have called around and tried to find Dusty, but fuck, her notebook now belonged to Reena. At the thought of Reena, Josephine turned in her sheets and was forced to listen to the wind through the trees. Had she known that Dusty would soon arrive at Seven Oaks, Josephine might have slept less fitfully.

A Constant Quest

    B EFORE THE DEATH, Reena’s grandfather would tell her of a village called Jandiala where there was no railway station, but wheat and cotton and sugar cane. There was a single school for boys, and there, Reena’s grandfather, as a young boy named Mukand Pallan, earned high grades and dreamed of his father.
    His father had gone to Canada in 1906. To go to Canada or Africa or England, that was the trend for young men in Jandiala. “They left to get settled, to make a living,” Mukand recalls. His father left the village and traveled by boat to Singapore and Shanghai, through Honolulu, and then to San Francisco, where he took a train to Seattle, and finally another smaller boat to Victoria.
    His father worked in a famous garden in Victoria, the Butchart Gardens, where acres of rare and magnificent flowers flourished in the mild and damp climate. He worked not with the flowers, but in a quarry, loading limestone from the sunken cavern. With the white ash on his hands, he walked home past the Himalayan poppies and Dutch tulips and French forget-me-nots.
    Mukand was born in 1926, the year his father returned to India. His father built a large three-story stone building in the village, and, on the ground floor, a store sold flour, grains, lentils, and sugar. He built a well for the village, and this brought the family even more respect because, as Mukand recalls, “it is a big contribution if you supply water.”
    Mukand was never sure why his father did not come back to the village. He left in 1929 and he did not return. Mukand thought it had something to do with the war, which ruptured all the ways of transportation.
Transportation.
The word was one of the first English words he learned and he would try to envision ships and planes, the modes of transportation that took his father away, transported him to Canada. The war made voyages home perilous, impossible. War kept his father in Victoria. Mukand missed his father and he tried to imagine Canada.
    Canada. This is how he imagined it: a cold country, snow, and lots of white people.
    From this country, his father sent silk, lots of silk from China. Mukand’s mother would sleep with her cheek on the smooth, red gift; she would drape the gift around her body and walk through Jandiala, serious, and with heartache. His father sent Viewmasters. You could look through them and see the sights of his father’s new town. The Empress Hotel, named after Queen Elizabeth and covered in ivy. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, dressed in red, their faces stern and white and mustachioed, the horses like singular cavalry. His mother told him, “You’ll go to Canada soon. When the war is over. Your father will come and get you.”
    But the war went on, and his