Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott Read Free Book Online

the spring, the light on the ridge whenever you wanted. The wood-burning stove was a black iron box on legs, set in front of a convex copper heat shield, which sent out heat when the fire was lit, glowed like soft flames when it wasn’t. There were little containers everywhere, tiny glass jars, framed photographs, handmade paper boxes holding more little secrets: a folded-up poem, a rock from the beach, a tiny ceramic house that Rae thought might once have been a hash pipe.
    Sometimes Rosie read Rae’s fashion magazines while Rae worked on deadline; she watched in awe as Rae, bent over the loom, took all that long skinny thread and yarn, which had no substance yet, and made things with which you could cover your walls or yourself. She sometimes crossed her eyes slightly so she could imagine Rae cave-painting, lost in those ancient rhythms. Rosie often got to help her make the dyes for her yarns. Sometimes they’d go out and pick things from fields or beside streams on the mountain and boil them: elderberries made lilac blue, prickly pear made a purplish pink, rabbitbrush made yellow. Sometimes what you plucked was a different color from the dye it produced: the red flowers didn’t necessarily make red wool. Beets made gold dye. Coffee beans made a dark yellow tan. But most of all, Rosie loved to hear the sounds of Rae’s deep rocking squatting labor, as she wove herself into the yarns, always weaving one tiny secret in between the threads.

four

    E LIZABETH had believed for years that Rae and Lank would make a good couple, but there was one real hitch in her plan: neither of them was interested in the other. Lank pursued young beauties who loved his gentleness and sweet face and always left him for more dashing men. Rae did not care so much what her men looked like just as long as they possessed certain qualities, which Rae listed as intelligence, humor, soul, and a love of oral sex—and which, if you asked Elizabeth, meant tendencies toward inconsistency, passive aggression, and a charming, jovial ability to be sadistic and noncommittal.
    “Don’t you
ever
entertain sexual feelings about Lank?” Elizabeth had asked a few days after the tournament in San Francisco. Elizabeth had become a Democratic precinct worker, and Rae had come over after lunch to walk around the neighborhood with her. They would go door to door like Girl Scouts, registering voters, soaking up sunshine, getting in some exercise.
    “Look, honey,” Rae said. “On slow days I have sexual feelings for waxed fruit. But I don’t feel anything romantic toward him. He’s family. Besides—I’m dating a flock of Bedouin now. Many of them are very thoughtful.”
    “Lank’s available,” said Elizabeth. “That’s why you’re not attracted.” They set out down the sidewalk. Bayview glowed, sun shining on all those greens—lawns and low hillsides, maple and pine and eucalyptus, the bay jade green in the distance. Rae turned to smile at her as they walked. A strip of bright green sour grass grew at the edge of the sidewalk, like a baseboard at the meeting of fence and sidewalk, a seven- or eight-foot stripe with brilliant yellow flowers, bent at the root after a wild wind the night before, lying forward on the pavement as if inobeisance—an English crowd bowing low while the weary monarch passed.
    T HE next morning, the last day of February, an unusually warm blue day, Charles Adderly came home from the hospital for good. His cancer, which had begun in his bones, had spread to a number of organs. He’d been admitted for an experimental course of chemotherapy but had been too sick to tolerate it. He was getting worse quickly and now had a full-time hospice nurse at home. One day not long ago he had been just fine, seventy-six years old but hale and animated, visiting friends, working on the house, driving to the library, bookstores, hardware stores, hiking with the Fergusons, resting every afternoon, swimming laps before dinner. Rosie felt that