Six months later, Maureen stabbed Mom.
Phoenix was square and straight, boxy and boxed in, and above all, fake.
Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true – Dylan Thomas, ‘Poem on His Birthday.
If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about.
The inconsistent spelling of words in the English language also vexed Dad to no end. Digraphs such as “sh” and “ph” infuriated him, and silent letters made him grieve. If words were simply spelled the way they were pronounced, he argued, pretty much anyone who learned the alphabet could read, and that would virtually wipe out illiteracy.
Everyone assumed I was a normal person,” she said. “It was weird.
My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.
Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius,” he said. “You take after your old man.
Mom was thirty-eight, not young but not old, either. In twenty-five years, I told myself, I’d be as old as she was now. I had no idea what my life would be like then, but as I gathered up my schoolbooks and walked out the door, I swore to myself that it would never be like Mom’s, that I would not be crying my eyes out in an unheated shack in some.
On our way back from the candy store, Brian and I liked to spy on the Green Lantern – a big dark green house with a sagging porch right near the highway. Mom said it was a cathouse, but I never saw any cats there, only women wearing bathing suits or short dresses who sat or lay out on the porch, waving at the cars that drove by. There were Christmas lights over the door all year round, and Mom said that was how you could tell it was a cathouse.
You know you’re down and out when the Okies laugh at you.
You mean you own land worth a million dollars?” I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars?
The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them.
She bought a bucket. It was made of yellow plastic, and we kept it on the floor in the kitchen, and that was what we used whenever we had to go to the bathroom. When it filled up, some brave soul would carry it outside, dig a hole, and empty it.
I took a breath. “He’s developing a technology to.
We stopped under a railroad bridge and got out of the car to admire the river that ran through the town.
Pleased to meet you, Grandma,’ I said.
Just remember,” Mom said after examining the blisters, “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” “If that was true, I’d be Hercules by now,” Lori said.
She snuggled into bed with them, looking up from time to time, saying she was sorry, she knew she should be doing something more productive, but like Dad, she had her addictions, and one of hers was reading.
I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought?