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Cover
Dedication
For my parents
1
She hated donuts. She felt bad about it, and vaguely unpatriotic, but there it was. She hated the heavy sweetness and the grease stains they left on her napkin and, inevitably, her pants and shirt cuffs. Still, she had been sucking them back wholesale for the past three weeks. Every morning from nine to noon as she made her slow, circuitous march around her office building, solidarity slogans emblazoned across her chest, she did it with a cruller in hand.
She ate them out of boredom, and because she was angry and depressed watching her colleagues staring into their reflections in the mirrored windows of their employer, cursing all those still inside. Really, she ate them because they were the offerings of the dwindling percentage of the public not yet openly hostile about how this little media set-to she found herself embroiled in was cocking up their prime time viewing and access to the news of the day. But she could see that even these rank-and-file supporters of public broadcasting were reaching their tolerance limit. The large, square boxes of full-sized chocolate glazed and plain old-fashioneds had been downgraded to toolbox-shaped containers of sourdough globs and the gross coconut and raisin monstrosities that even children don’t like.
The night before, she had even started dreaming about them, waking from a nightmare in which she found herself buried to the chin in a child’s bouncy ball castle overflowing with sticky pellets, trying to keep her head from going under as her mother called out to her that she shouldn’t get her picket sign dirty. That was just too much. When the alarm went off, she knew she couldn’t face another morning pastry and called in sick from not working.
She coughed disdainfully in response to her strike captain’s admonishments that she had a responsibility to be there and his persistent reminder that the enemy, who only a few short weeks ago he’d been more than happy to go out with for after-work drinks, were devious, money-grubbing jackoffs and that they would not be calling in sick today. “Those sons of bitches will be all over the air talking about how hard they are working to get us back in there … like they weren’t the ones to lock us out. Sonsabitches.”
She stared at the stucco ceiling, thinking again what an insidious invention stucco was, how easy it had been to put it up there and how impossible to get it off, and how dated and crappy it looked, while the drone in her ear talked of her duty to make sure the public understood this wasn’t their doing.
“We’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about here, Cyn; we’re the ones getting screwed.”
She wasn’t embarrassed. For the better part of her radio career, Cynthia had found herself having to justify her publicly funded salary to some private-sector rube or another. She had been on the picket line before and had to face the angry comments and valid questions of those who felt they were being used as pawns in somebody else’s war. This wasn’t her first barbeque. She wasn’t embarrassed at all. She was just tired — tired and bloated. She was forty-five and a single mom and slightly arthritic in her left hand and fifteen pounds overweight, and she just didn’t damn well feel like going downtown today to march around a building to beg for the chance to do her job.
“I’m really not feeling well, John,” she sniffled unconvincingly. “Stop giving me hell and show a little solidarity with this injured comrade, would you.”
“I expect to see you here tomorrow, Cynthia, no kidding. People want to see the public faces out here on the block too. No one gives a damn about the electricians. We have got to pressure these bastards into fixing this mess.”
She considered reminding him that they worked in radio and no one knew what the hell she looked like anyway. She also toyed with the idea of reminding him that once they fixed this mess, he was going to have to have to work with those “bastards” once again. In the end she just said she’d see how she was feeling tomorrow, hung up, and dropped happily back into bed.
But now that she was free to lie there for the remainder of the day, of course she couldn’t. She was all of a sudden antsy and unsure of what to do with this stolen time. The kids had headed off to school and Ellen would already be en route for their walkabout, unaware that Cynthia had pulled ’chute.
Getting out of bed, she headed towards the stairs, resisting the urge to pop her head into the kids’ rooms and bear witness to the ungodly chaos they had unleashed. That would only end with Cynthia up to the knees in her son’s dirty laundry and on the losing side of a guaranteed fight about “privacy” when her daughter got home, so she pressed on, stopping briefly to notice the carpet on the stairs was decidedly worn and wondering tiredly when the hell the whole house had begun to fall apart. In the kitchen she started a pot of coffee, and her mood, which had lately taken to turning on a dime, improved exponentially. She took immense pleasure in the scent of the beans as she ground them, the splash of cold distilled water hitting the glass carafe, and the feel of the warm ceramic of her favourite mug in her hands.
Taking that first sip of the first decent cup of coffee she’d had since this whole pain in the ass started, Cynthia Wilkes sat at her kitchen table, kicked up her feet, and allowed herself to consider that perhaps her life was not an entire disaster. She still had two kids home with her, and all three bright and healthy. She was fairly confident that they were happy, if sometimes unbearable in the way that only adolescents can be. She owned her own home, quite the feat if you considered the city she lived in and the work she did. Plus, she noted as the warmth from her cup slowly began to soothe her stiff fingers, a few achy joints aside, she was holding up pretty well. In fact, only just the other day a man had called her stone cold fox. Well, to be precise, the term he’d used was stone cold silver fox, and the man was the homeless and most certainly alcoholic fellow who guarded, of his own volition and seemingly with no financial motivation, the door to her neighbourhood public library. Still, he’d sounded sincere.
She also knew, from unfortunately not-uncommon experience, that this pissing contest at work would eventually come to an end, and while she would probably end up going back to a place that was just a little bit worse than before, she would be going back, which wasn’t a guarantee for everyone walking around down there.
For Cynthia, things would generally continue to roll along as they had for the past decade or so. While the past held its traumatic moments, and whose had not, hers had been a voyage of generally placid seas, one on which she was afforded all necessities and more than a few perks. It was without question more than most had. This thought didn’t make her feel much better, which she found mildly surprising and a bit pretentious. It was a little too “First World problems” for her liking, and she didn’t really want to think about it, so she decided that not thinking would be the order of the day. She brought the mug up close to her face to inhale the warmth and aroma and turned her head to stare idly out the picture window at the fading remnants of her summer garden.
From this position she did not see the girl standing on the front porch, staring at her intently. The girl was ten years old. She seemed younger, unless you looked into her eyes. Her name was Abigail and she was standing fascinated, on tiptoe, watching Cynthia sipping on her morning coffee with her slippered feet up on the opposite chair.
Abigail knew Cynthia. She knew of her. They were strangers really, though they had much in common. Most valuable among them, in Abigail’s mind, was the family name she saw engraved on the antique mailbox beside the door. This was how she knew she had arrived at the right house. Her hand had already started to lift up the lid when she spotted Cynthia walking across the kitchen, and she froze. She had been standing there like a statue ever since, only her eyes moving as she surveyed all she could through the window.
Abigail had come to the house by herself, unannounced, not expecting anyone to be home. She had hoped only to leave