Father of the Rain by Lily King Read Free Book Online Page B

sink, then coming back to help her up.
    “I’m fine,” she says, but she lets him. Then she bends back down to me and gives me a kiss on my forehead like my grandfather did at bedtime. She smells nice and I hope my brother will marry her like he said. They call good night to me over their shoulders and disappear, arm in arm, into her room.
    I do our dishes. There’s a TV in the corner and I would turn it on but I’m scared Deena will reappear and want to talk to me again, so I go back to Garvey’s room, read more about the man who is a breast, and go to sleep.
    I forget to go to the bathroom, so I wake up in the middle of the night. As I quietly open the door and cross the sticky hallway, I keep hearing my brother imitating my father.
You kids have got to keep an eye on him!
I can see that twenty-five-dollar mutt and his prickly hair and long ugly face.
You kids. You kids
. And he isn’t talking to me or my brother anymore.
    I don’t flush or wash my hands for fear of waking someone, but as I cross back I look down the hallway and see that someone else is up. Garvey. I can see the narrow outline of his back. He’s moving, stretching or scratching, tilting his head to one side. I want to go back to bed, but I have a feeling he needs me, wants some company.
    “Hey,” I whisper as I move closer, but he doesn’t hear.
    A few more steps and the whole scene changes, from Garvey alone itching his back to something else altogether. The hand onhis back is not his own and it’s not a hand but a foot and a shin. There are two of them, locked together, moving together, kissing, twisting, all in complete silence. And then they turn, Garvey carrying her in a frontwards piggyback, his legs buckling slightly as he moves toward the couch, her legs wrapped around him, both of them naked, scraping against each other, and then falling into the cushions, her enormous breasts flopping to the sides and Garvey scooping them and shoving them into his mouth, all the while his bum moving up and down and her hands down between their legs, and her face, Deena’s face, in a silent scream.

4
     
    On Monday my mother picks me up and we drive straight to Ashing. It feels like I have been gone many years. We pass the Christmas tree farm, the inn at the corner of Baker Street, the Citgo station, and then my mother, instead of driving through the middle of town and up the hill to Myrtle Street, turns right onto Water Street and then left into a parking lot. It looks like a miniature motel, beige with white trim, with six apartments, three up and three down. My mother pats my leg. “We’re home.”
    Our apartment is on the bottom in the middle. There’s a large
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on the door, which she opens with a key she’s already hidden in the little lantern above the doorbell.
    “I don’t think either of us want to bother with carrying a key,” she says. We never, as far as I know, had a key to our old house. I don’t even remember there being locks on the doors.
    All the furniture has been moved in, chairs and couches and beds that used to be on Myrtle Street. I sit on the sofa with yellow flowers that used to be in the den. Is my father sitting on the floor now?
    “Come see your room.”
    I follow her down a long hallway. My room is small and dark. The one window looks out at our car in its spot. But my old beds are in there, with the same white bedspreads, and all my stuffed animals are on top. I forgot to pack any of my stuffed animals in June, and now they seem strange to me, stupid, with their puffed-up bellies and sewn-on smiles.
    “Well?”
    “I like it.” I hate it. “Can I see yours?”
    Hers is at the end of the hallway, as large as the living room, with French doors that go out to a deck, and the canopy bed she took from the guest room. All my life I’ve been asking to have that bed in my room.
    “We need to hang things on the walls, buy some plants, but it has potential,” she says. “And it’s convenient, being downtown. You can