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By Root 755 0

Karen’s mother hated so much, with Karen’s summer clothes packed neatly into a suitcase and her mother’s overnight bag beside it on the rack above their heads. They passed dirt fields, isolated houses, grey sagging barns, herds of cows. Karen’s mother hated cows. One of her stories was about having to get up in the winter, in blizzards, before sunrise even, and go out shivering through the whirling snow to feed the cows. But, “You’ll like the cows,” she said now, in the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos at school. She checked her lipstick in the mirror of her compact, then smiled at Karen to see how she was taking it. Karen smiled back uncertainly. She was used to smiling even when she didn’t feel like it. She would be in Grade Two in September; she was hoping she wouldn’t be put in her mother’s class.

This wasn’t her first time staying away from home. Other times she’d been sent to her aunt, her mother’s older sister Viola. Sometimes it was just overnight, because her mother was going out; sometimes it was for weeks, especially in the summers. Her mother needed a long rest in the summers because of her nerves. Well, who wouldn’t have nerves, considering? said Aunt Vi with disapproval, as if what could Karen’s mother expect? She was speaking to Uncle Vern but looking sideways at Karen as if the nerves were Karen’s doing. But surely not all of them were, because Karen tried to do what she was told, although sometimes she made mistakes; and there were other things, like the sleepwalking, that she couldn’t help.

The nerves were the fault of the war. Karen’s father was killed in the war when Karen wasn’t even born yet, leaving Karen’s mother to bring up Karen all by herself – a thing that was understood to be very hard, practically impossible. There was something else too, which had to do with Karen’s mother’s wedding, or else the absence of it. Whether her father and her mother were actually married was one of the many things Karen wasn’t sure about, although her mother called herself Mrs. and wore a ring. There were no wedding photos, but things had been done differently during the war; everyone said so. There was something in Aunt Vi’s tone of voice that alerted Karen: she was an embarrassment, someone who could only be spoken of obliquely. She wasn’t quite an orphan but she had the taint of one.

Karen didn’t miss her dead father, because how could you miss someone you never even knew? But she was told by her mother that she ought to miss him. There was a framed snapshot of him – not with her mother, but alone, in his uniform, his long bony face looking solemn and somehow already dead – which appeared and disappeared from the mantelpiece, depending on the state of Karen’s mother’s health. When she was up to looking at it, the picture was there; otherwise not. Karen used the picture of her father as a sort of weather report. When it vanished she knew there was going to be trouble, and she tried to keep out of the road, out from underfoot, out of her mother’s hair (road, feet, hair, how could she be on or under or in all of them at the same time?). But she didn’t always succeed, or else she succeeded too well and her mother would accuse her of daydreaming, of not helping, of not caring, of not giving a sweet Jesus about anyone but herself, and her voice would go up high, up higher, up dangerously high, like a thermometer, into the red part.

Karen tried to help, she tried to care. She would have cared except she didn’t know what she was supposed to care about, and also there were so many things she needed to watch, because of the colours, and other things she needed to listen to. Hours before a storm, when the sky was still windless and blue, she would feel the whisper of the distant lightning running up her arms. She heard the phone before it rang, she heard pain gathering in her mother’s hands, building up there like water behind a dam, getting ready to spill over, and she would stand terrified in the middle of the floor with her eyes elsewhere, looking – her mother said – like an idiot. Stupid! Maybe she was