More in Anger by J. Jill Robinson

doing. As she passed the garage door, she smelled smoke. Tobacco smoke. She pushed open the garage’s side door, and inside in the cool shadows she discovered Michael, not yet eight, waving his hands through the air in a futile attempt to disperse the smoke. Opal ran at him, smacked him around the head with her purse, smacked him while he ducked and wept, and then held him against her in the cool dark while his body shook with grief.
    Jimmy died at the end of an unusually hot and humid August day. The boys were across the street fishing in the Elbow River. The two women sat beside his body, bathed in their own perspiration, tears and sweat coursing down their faces and between their breasts to their bellies.
    As the family all left the house in Winnipeg together in their sombre grey and black funeral clothes, suits, dresses, coats and hats, in spite of the hot summer day, and filed past Melville in the porch where he sat in his favourite chair, he did not raise his head: he watched their feet as they went by. He was wearing his suit, but with a scarf of Pearly K’s, red and white striped silk, tied in a bow around his neck.
    â€œWe thought you were getting ready to go, Mel,” said Opal.
    â€œGuess you thought wrong,” he said.
    â€œI didn’t say you could wear my scarf,” said Pearly K.
    â€œTough,” said Melville. “I never asked if I could.” He would not speak another word to anyone, just sat there hunched over, smoking and mumbling and smoking. He would smoke uncontrollablyfor days, Georgie told Opal, in his lap a carton of Jimmy’s brand of cigarettes. He didn’t use an ashtray, just ground out each butt on the porch floor with the heel of his boot after he had lit a fresh one.
    Opal watched her elder daughter closely as Pearl approached the coffin at the front of the church, but no look of sadness or grief crossed her daughter’s face. May snuffled and sobbed beside her mother. After standing at the coffin for about ten seconds, Pearl returned to the pew and sat down again. Opal kept watching her. How could anyone be so hard, so heartless?
    Before the lid of the casket was closed, Mabel Maude approached the coffin with her three children one last time. She leaned into the coffin and kissed her husband goodbye. Her little sons were clustered around her, their bewildered faces full of sadness. One boy reached in and tried to hold his father’s hand, but pulled away at the coldness and stiffness, and the look he gave in that split second was full of realization. Pearl’s were surely the only dry eyes in the church as everyone watched this scene. Even the minister wept.
    But when the church had been emptied of the living and the dead, Pearl couldn’t be found to go with them to the interment, and Opal went back into the church to look for her. When she heard the sounds of sobbing and of moaning coming from inside the bathroom, she stopped outside the door. As she listened to the sounds of sorrow, a small but joy-filled smile of gratitude spread tentatively across her face, as though the sound of her daughter in anguish were a gift from God. Her daughter had a heart after all. Opal whispered a thank-you before she pushed open the bathroom door.
    Inside, Pearl was leaning against the wall, her hot cheek against the small white tiles. Her shoulders slumped, she held herself in her arms as though she were in pain. Pearl’s face was turned upwards, twisted and distorted, transfigured and wet, tears still streaming down her face. Opal approached her daughter tentatively, carefully, scrabbling to open her purse and get out a hanky, which she offered, saying, “Dear?” But when Pearl turned to her, the look on her face was instantly one of sheer hatred, and she hissed, “Get away .” And Opal, longing, aching, lamenting, went.
    A week or two later, Opal and May climbed the hill home together after helping Mabel Maude sort through