Read The Imposter Bride for Free Online

open and her stuffing started falling out—and flowers for her hostess, irises that she had bought at the florist next door to her mother’s jewellery shop. “May Flowers,” Elka elaborated. That was where we still bought our flowers every Friday afternoon those eight months of the year that we couldn’t cut them from our own garden.
    My mother welcomed Elka with a kiss on both cheeks. “That’s what they do in Europe,” Elka explained. She also thanked Elka for the doll and flowers. “She was always very polite, your mother. You could tell she’d been well brought up.”
    “Please,” my mother said, indicating the couch in the living room where Elka should take a seat as my mother went into the kitchen with the flowers to arrange them in a vase. There was a cake on the coffee table, which surprised Elka, she had to admit. My mother wasn’t much for cooking or baking. There were evenings … and here Elka hesitated, but it had to be said. For the sake of honesty and full disclosure. Quite often my mother would slice a tomato and a couple of hard-boiled eggs, place them on the table with a pitcher of iced tea and call that dinner, Elka revealed. (Quite often when people are very, very sad they lose their appetites and it’s hard for them to eat, my father said.) “It’s possible she had servants growing up,” Elka said.
    Elka didn’t have a seat. She went over to the crib by the window, where I lay sound asleep like a little doll. That’show I seemed to Elka, at that time: like a little doll, perfect and beautiful. My mother brought the flowers into the living room, placed them on the coffee table beside the cake, smiled at Elka, and then went back into the kitchen to put the coffee on. She may have exclaimed when she opened the fridge, may have slapped her head for dramatic effect, may even have made some comment about her own absent-mindedness. Elka was too noisily cooing at me to hear what was going on in the kitchen, did not become aware of my mother again until she re-emerged from the kitchen apologizing for her forgetfulness. She had run out of milk, she explained, and would have to dash across the street for a minute to buy some.
    “I can go,” Elka offered.
    “Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “When I invite you for coffee I don’t send you out to buy your own milk. Will you be all right with the baby for a few minutes?”
    (She may not have said it exactly like that—she was from Europe and had only been in Montreal a year by then. But she also might have, because she was an expert at languages, even English. On that point everyone in my family agreed.)
    Elka was a little nervous to be left alone with me. She had never been alone with a baby so young before. With any baby, actually. “You’ll never have that problem,” Elka assured me. Because of Jeffrey, she meant. I’d been helping her take care of him since he was born. “She’ll be fine,” Lily assured her. Me, she meant. “I just fed her before you got here.” Elka nodded and said that she too would be fine. And so my mother put on her hat with the veil that covered half her face, pulled on the long gloves without which she never ventured out into the sun, tucked her purse under her arm and left.
    And at first everything was fine. I slept. Elka waited. Shewas sure it wouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes or so. But fifteen minutes passed, then a half-hour. I was still sleeping, but Elka was beginning to wonder what was keeping my mother. Maybe there was a really long lineup at the store, Elka told herself. Maybe there were a few other things my mother had to get once she was out. But finally, when a whole hour had passed, Elka knew something was wrong. She called her mother, who did not say Don’t worry . She said she would be right over, though it took her an entire half-hour to close up her jewellery shop and make her way over to the apartment, by which time I was awake and crying and Elka was crying too and my mother had