Read Online Way the Crow Flies by Ann-marie MacDonald - Free Book Online

driveway to the front porch, which is located at the side of the house for privacy from your neighbours, who live on the other side. Jack gets out of the car, walks around and opens Mimi’s door. She gets out and takes his arm.
    Their parents always lead the way to the door of the new house. Mike follows, hands jammed in his pockets, observing the tradition but looking down. He is getting old enough to feel conspicuous—this walk up to their new house, an intimate act performed in public. Madeleine slides from the back seat and turns on the movie camera in her mind—I must remember this, the first walk up to our door.
    They are coming to the end of their homeless sojourn. In these last few moments they are still vulnerable, soft-shelled. Roofless for another few seconds, open to the rain, to kindness, to cruelty. Jack climbs three concrete steps to the small porch, opens the screen door and reaches into his pocket for the key. Mike runs back to the car for something as Jack slides the key into the lock.
    Then Jack does what he always does, over Mimi’s squeals and protests. He scoops her up in his arms and carries her across the threshold. Madeleine covers her face and peeks through her fingers,mortified and delighted. Mike returns and tosses her mangy Bugs Bunny to her. “Come on, kiddo,” he says. She hugs Bugs and follows her brother into the house.
    To the left of the vestibule, stairs descend to the basement. Directly in front it’s up three steps and a quick right to the kitchen—functional Formica, frost-free Frigidaire and Westinghouse oven, with just room to spare for a small table and four chairs. A window over the sink looks onto the front lawn. In Mimi’s mind it is already curtained. To the left is the living room with fireplace and, immediately off it, the dining room. It never seems possible that the china cabinet and buffet will fit once the dining suite is in, but somehow they always do. A bay window in the living room overlooks the backyard and one of Centralia’s big empty green fields ringed by the backs of houses.
    Mimi squints, mentally arranging the furniture—couch under the window, framed oil painting of the Alps over the mantelpiece, reproduction of Dürer’s Praying Hands on the kitchen wall. She leads the way up fourteen steps that turn on a modest landing, to three bedrooms and the bathroom. She makes the sign of the cross when she enters the master bedroom. Once the moving van has arrived, she will call up the Catholic padre and have him bless the house. Mimi is not as devout as her mother, but the master bedroom is where children are conceived.
    Madeleine and Mike know better than to squabble over the choice of bedrooms. Maman is the commanding officer at home and she will assign quarters.
    They troop back downstairs, footsteps clattering, voices hollow. Mimi turns to Jack, arms folded.
    He says, “What do you think, Missus?”
    She tilts her head.
“Ça va faire.”
    He smiles. Passed inspection.
    The four of them stand in their new living room. The empty smell. Fresh paint and cleanser. The white echo of the place.
    Tonight they will sleep in a motel. Tomorrow the moving van will come and, though they will eat in a restaurant again, they will sleep in their own house. On the third night, Mimi will make a fabulous supper in their own kitchen, and from then on the house willbreathe with the smells of home. An invisible welcome will billow like sheets in a breeze when they walk in the door.
Hello
.
    That night in the motel, tucked into a rollaway cot, Madeleine asks her mother to tell The Story of Mimi and Jack.
    “Oui, conte-nous ça, maman,”
says Mike, snug in the extra bed.
    And Mimi tells the story. “‘Once upon a time there was a little Acadian nurse called Mimi, and a handsome young air force officer named Jack….’”
    If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t