The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

spiral outward from the downtown like waving octopus legs, the streets lined with curious old houses with wraparound front verandahs and soaring trees. The weather is peculiar. At first it is sunny and warm, and then a cool breeze blows in with mist that drapes over the tops of the quaint buildings as moss hangs on branches — then the mist clears, leaving a sky smudged with white clouds.

“Frank tells me the village doubles in size now in the summer from all the tourists. It’s still early in the day but just you watch.”

Two old men with beards smoke pipes on a bench. They wear caps and nod at Stella and her father as they walk by. “Beautiful day,” her father says. The plumper man puffs on his pipe and speaks in a cloud of smoke: “Don’t let that fool you. The weather can turn in the time it takes to have a piss.” Stella’s father raises his eyebrows. He’s such a prude, Stella thinks.

Up ahead, a young family walks to a car laden with suitcases, the man clean shaven and the woman with teased poufy hair. The man stops them and pulls out a map from his back pocket. “We can’t figure out how to get out of this place. We got here in the dark last night and got lost just trying to get to the inn. And the directions they gave us at the diner where we had breakfast didn’t make a lot of sense.”

Stella’s father points at the one-way street sign.

“Oh right, another one of those one-way streets. This place was designed to disorient you.” The man laughs as he shakes his map.

Stella watches her father play local historian. “It actually was designed to disorient you. The story goes that the streets were laid out this way so the devil would have trouble coming into town. And so that the good townsfolk would have trouble leaving into the evil outside world.”

Stella sees how carefully the man studies her father. “I thought you were tourists too.”

“We’re locals,” her father says tersely, obviously surprised the man had taken them for visitors. Her father’s reaction is the only surprise to Stella, considering how they are dressed — Stella’s father in his tweed jacket, Stella in her smocked green sundress.

At the end of the street a cobblestone path leads through a black iron arch into the fenced graveyard. They walk under the rusty old arch, which has an elaborate iron bird at its centre, wings outspread and flowers and berries clutched in its beak.

The stones in the back of the graveyard are mossy and worn. Stella finds the family plot, the tombstones an old style, a border carved in the marble, a weeping willow cut into the centre. Fingers pointing upward. Gone home chiselled into the stone.

Stella sees that her grandmother died the year after Violette, leaving just her father and his father, the stern Mr. Sprague. “They died years ago,” Stella’s father says. “Poor Stella Violette.” He wipes at his eyes and tugs Stella’s hand away from the stones. “It wasn’t right that Violette died so young. She was only thirteen. It was a tragedy. She drowned, Stella. She couldn’t swim.”

As they walk home, Stella lets him hold her hand for the first time in forever.

Stella’s father comes outside into the back verandah where she’s sketching some of the flowers in the wildness of the garden. “You want your brain to rest. You don’t need to fire up your brain to draw pictures out of nothing. Have a look at these, ready-made.”

He hands her an album of old postcards from the days of hospitals in the country, of tuberculosis sanatoriums. Stella finds it odd her father doesn’t consider that looking at postcards and photos of hospitals might hurt her brain more than sketching or reading. Probably he just wants to talk to her about his work. It’s always easier for him to use his work as a bridge to intimacy, even with her, not even a teenager. Stella sighs as her father comes back with a cold beer and a glass of water for Stella.

Stella drinks the water. She’s parched. Her father doesn’t notice how she guzzles it down. He is lost in history again.

“Hospitals today are generic, designed with industrial efficiency, places with no humanity. But the buildings we live in are what we leave behind. Look at the pyramids, mysterious, perplexing. Look at the Victorian brick buildings, gothic and stern. These old buildings are ripped down. We’re being robbed not just of our history but our heart and soul, Little Bear.”

As Stella flips through the postcard album, her father sits close beside her, lovingly running his fingers over the pictures. She can smell his aftershave, spicy and sweet on his warm summer skin. The sun has come around as it’s near noon, and it beams in on her head and casts her father in a hazy illumination. The scent from the jasmine growing up the trellis at the side of the verandah is cloying. She sees golden wax inside her father’s ear and, outside on the edge, crystals of shaving cream, how the dried foam resembles coral, as though tiny bits of the sea have clung to him, that his ears are shells. His eyebrows are thick and wiry and hair sprouts from his ears — Stella thinks he looks like a creature that has stumbled from the Mercy River, something that’s swum in all the way from the Bay of Fundy.

Stella remembers her mother trimming his hair, his eyebrows, clipping the straggly hairs on his ears that sprouted when he was nearing fifty. But her mother is gone now and this is what Stella is left with, this father in a rumpled cotton shirt with coffee and ink stains on the breast pocket. This father has lived a life apart from his daughter, and their new proximity has jarred him, set him off kilter. He has dark circles under his eyes. Stella thinks maybe his judgement