Father of the Rain by Lily King Read Free Book Online

drive me out. The bathroom is filthier in broad daylight. I don’t let my skin touch the toilet seat, the way my mother has taught me. I find cornflakes and milk in the kitchen, and just as I sit down with my big bowl on the couch, Deena’s door opens and a man comes out, naked. He’s very hairy.
    “Hey,” he says, reaching for his jeans and T-shirt, which are beside me on the couch. He leaves, still naked, out the swinging, knobless front door. I hear him dressing in the hallway, then his bare feet sticking on the stairs on the way down.
    The heat has retreated slightly; a breeze, an actual breeze, comes through the windows.
    Deena’s door opens again. “Shit. Is he gone?”
    “Yeah,” I say.
    “Shit.” She looks down at a pair of glasses in her hand. “Shit.”
    She throws them out the window. Then she stretches her long arms up to the ceiling and side to side. She is naked too, and her breasts are enormous, three times the size of my mother’s. She’s thin so they don’t even seem to fit properly on her chest, the nipples nearly facing each other. Her waist tapers in and then her hips flair out and her thighs are thick and strong. Her body is fascinating to me, womanly in a way my mother and my aunts in Chigham are not.
    “I’ll get something on and join you,” she says, noticing my stare. She comes back in a short shiny robe that barely covers her bum.
    “So your parents are splitting up,” she says, sitting beside me where the man’s clothes had been.
    “Yeah.”
    “How does that feel?”
    How does that feel? The question echoes. I shrug.
    “Was it hard with them fighting all the time?”
    “They never fought. They didn’t really talk to each other all that much.”
    She laughs. “I guess you and Garvey had different parents.”
    “No,” I say quickly, before I get what she means.
    “He tell you where he was going this morning?”
    “No,” I say again.
    She pushes her thick lips in and out, thinking. If I ask I know she’ll tell me but she strikes me as dangerous, full of things I don’t want to know.
    “He is really fucked up. You know that, don’t you?”
    My heart starts beating really fast, the beginnings of the dead star feeling. I put my bowl in the sink and go back to Garvey’s room. I lock the door. When I glance out the window, there they are in front of the house, not moving. The top of Heidi’s head is pressed into my brother’s chest and his arms are wrapped awkwardly around her. It looks like he’s the only thing keeping her from collapsing to the ground.
    A half hour later they come inside. I wait for Garvey to come back to his room to check on me but he doesn’t. I hear them moving things around in Heidi’s room, then a kettle whistles and my brother calls, “Milk and honey?” down the hallway and she says, “Yes, please,” her voice low and ragged like she hasn’t used it yet this morning, or maybe has used it too much.
    They settle in there, on the other side of the wall from me. Their talk is quiet and intermittent, calm, like little waves lapping against a hull. Then I hear something awful, a sort of yelp, like the wail of an animal in the woods, impossible to tell if it is male or female, only that it is coming from the room next to mine. Then it’s quiet.
    I find a thin paperback on the floor called
The Breast
. “It began oddly,” it begins. “But could it have begun otherwise, however it began?” I read a few chapters. A regular guy has turned into a big hundred-and-fifty-five-pound boob. His penis changes first, into a nipple. Only Garvey would own a book like this. When I get tired of reading, I try to snoop but there is nothing, no secret notebookor hidden scraps of paper in his drawers. I’m angry at him for forgetting about me and I want to find something terrible about him that I can shove in his face.
    When he finally does come in, he drops down face first on the bed and doesn’t move or speak for a long time. His threadbare flannel shirt