I worked at a grocery store and they paid us in cash every week. I would just stick the money in my pocket and never go to the bank. I bought Tutti a giant stuffed animal, a Mickey Mouse telephone, sheets and pillowcases with cats wearing running shoes on them, and I bought a kit and made her a Christmas stocking with her name on it. I can’t remember what else I bought. Anytime I saw something, I bought it. This past year was our eleventh Christmas together, and I bought her a plastic rack for inside the kitchen pantry door, where she can put her rolls of food wrap.
She is lying in bed beside me right now, with her back to me. I think she has finally gone to sleep. I came back from a meeting where I had just been elected to the board of directors and I came home in the rain, and there she was, on the couch, watching TV.
Now we are up here in bed and I am wide awake. I think she’s asleep. But she might just be pretending she is asleep so she doesn’t have to listen to me anymore. She might, at some point, have said to her self, “I can’t listen to this anymore,” closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep.
I don’t think she’s pretending. I really don’t.
But, the thing is, it occurred to me. There was a time when something like this would never have entered my head.
– from the novel DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL, by the Canadian author Ken Sparling, who has the prose style I want to be when I grow up.
Dara Weinberg 