Kit's Law by Donna Morrissey Page B

around, and if they do, you want a clean house to greet them and a clean hand to shake theirs.
    For the most part Josie listened. Then, as Doctor Hodgins neared the end of his talk, and I slipped on a wet rock, she gave me a shove, toppling me sideways, and ran off towards Crooked Feeder.
    “Hey, Josie,” Doctor Hodgins called after her.
    “She thinks I killed Nan,” I said, taking hold of Doctor Hodgins’s arm to steady myself.
    “It’s not going to be easy, Kit,” he sighed, watching as she bounded sure-footed over the slush-covered rocks. He turned to me and, laying his hands on my shoulders, bent down and shook me, gently. “You’ve got your own grieving to do, along with fending off Josie’s. But you’ll do it. There’s a lot of Lizzy in you, probably more than what’s good for you.” He smiled the saddest smile and, pulling my head against the breast of his jacket, continued speaking in his quiet, gruff way. “I wish I could make it easier for you, Kit. You can come live with me and Elsie any time, you know that, don’t you?”
    I nodded, his wool jacket scratching against my face.
    “Are you sure you don’t want to?”
    “I’m sure,” I muffled into his coat. He patted the back of my head.
    “I know. I know. This is your home, why would you want to leave it?” He pulled back and looked at me, his eyes grey slits beneath their bushy brow. “Just remember what I told you—come to me if you need anything. Anything! You promise?”
    I nodded.
    “Promise me!” he repeated.
    “I promise.”
    He stroked my cheek with the pad of his thumb and I was back to thinking on Nan buffing turrs again, and being careful not to break the skin and sap the oil. And then he was squinting his eyes into the salty wind as we started walking up the beach after Josie. His hand gripped my shoulder as our feet scrunched over the beach rocks and the loneliest seagull in the world cried out above us, drawing a single tear down the side of Doctor Hodgins’s coarsened cheek.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    G RIEVING N AN
    D ESPITE EVERYONE’S WORRIES ABOUT me and Josie, it was a good year that passed. Shine never came back. Doctor Hodgins came faithfully twice, sometimes three times, a week, and had supper with us. Old Joe and his brother kept bringing out truckloads of birch, and there was always someone dropping off a fresh fish, a bottle of beets or a chunk of moose meat. Aunt Drucie dodged over every morning, sometimes after I had already left for school, and she went home again right after supper each evening. Her sleeping sickness kept her occupied most of the time that she was with us. Feeling all tuckered out from her walk over, she liked to take a nap in the rocker to get her breath back, giving me time on the weekends to get the dishes washed, beds made and floors mopped. By the time she woke up, she’d forgotten that she’d seen an unmade bed and was telling everybody in Haire’s Hollow how clean me and Josie was, and how we were the nicest girls in the world to work for because we never whined, mouthed back or asked for anything.
    I took to watching how she cooked, and before the year was up, I could make a pot of pease soup, scrape and fry up a salmon, or throw together a pot of moose stew as quick as Nan; anything to get Aunt Drucie out of the house early. Not that I minded her so much, but I could best hear Nan when I had the place to myself, and when I could best find comfort. Sitting in her rocking chair, with the fire crackling in the stove and the wind hurtling the snow against the window, I could forget that she had passed on and feel her humming all around me, and see and hear everything she ever did and said, like looking at a picture, only I saw it in sounds: the creaking of the floor beneath the weight of her step, her ongoing arguing, the twittering in her throat as she sucked on the hard green candies and the rumbling in her belly while she filled up with gas. And it’s like there’s a smell that comes with