Read Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story for Free Online Page B

urgent. “She said, ‘I don’t know who this fatso is.’ She said,
‘It isn’t me.’ “
    Marion swallows around what feels like an acorn in her throat. “You just can’t come into the world a woman and decide to be a man. That’s what this is all about. You can’t do that.”
    He goes on as if she hasn’t spoken. “Grace has the same dilemma I have. She knows who she is.” He thumps his fist where she hit him, over his heart. “But she’s in the wrong container.”
    Marion lets out a morose laugh. Grace as a container. “I thought I fell in love with a man,” she says. “I thought I was marrying a man.”
    “You did,” he says. “You did.”
    She lifts her eyes to his face. Against all the visible evidence, she says, “You’re not a man.”
    He starts blinking. He lowers his head. He carefully folds the letter and puts it back in the envelope. When he looks straight at her again, she thinks he’s going to kill her. “Who are you to say that?” he says quietly. His pupils are the size of pinholes. “Who are you to tell me who I am?” He reaches, and she flinches, but he’s only pulling his jacket off the coat rack.
    Her father and Grace were married in May, in Detroit, but they came back to the farm to live. It was a huge wedding, paid for by Grace, who waved away Marion’s father’s protests, saying, “The bride pays! The bride pays! That’s the tradition!” and who arranged it all so fast and with such scouring efficiency, blasting the caterers on the phone while zooming out seams on herwedding dress (which she was sewing herself, using Marion’s mother’s ancient Singer), that all Marion’s father had to do was stay out of the way.
    After her second visit in early April she had moved in. She’d had her own phone line installed in the guest room, and she began doing all her Christmas tree business from there, sitting at Peter’s little rolltop desk. When she wasn’t on the phone—or sewing, or typing—she was baking. She showed Marion how to bake roll cakes and soufflés. She also painted the master bedroom pale yellow. She didn’t even consult Marion’s father, she just bought the paint and went ahead. “Green isn’t my colour,” was her explanation, not that Marion’s father demanded one. With the paint that was left, she put a coat on one wall in the guest room. “I’ve got ants in my pants,” she said. “I can’t keep still.” After supper, in front of the TV , she knit sweaters for Marion’s father, multi-coloured cable knits that straightened his posture, he wore them with such pride.
    He’d come a long way since that first visit, when her bossiness, her spectacular size, and especially the news that she was made of money seemed to hit him like a shovel. That entire weekend he wore his neck brace to keep his head from thrashing, and after she was gone he fell into a kitchen chair and said, “What the Sam Hill have I gotten myself into?”
    “I liked her,” Marion said. She did. She liked Grace’s good-natured self-awareness. When Grace had caught Marion’s father staring at the way she loaded food into her mouth, she’d said, “This isn’t a hormone problem, Bill. This is pure unadulterated appetite.”
    “I liked her laugh,” Marion said.
    Her father nodded.
    “She’s going to teach me how to knit,” Marion said.
    “You don’t say?” her father said. He frowned and scratched under his neck brace. “All that money’s something to think about,” he said uneasily.
    “For heaven’s sakes, Dad. What if she were thousands of dollars in debt? Most people would say you’ve hit the jackpot.”
    “Well, I don’t know …”
    Something brought him around, though, something Grace must have written in the daily letters she continued to send. Because she came back. She came back with two trunks of clothes, a typewriter and eight boxes of business files. And three boxes of wedding invitations, already printed up.
    The entire family, plus six of her