Florida by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online Page A

nights before him, their mother would come home very late, jangling. She usually made dinner for the girls, then left the older girl in charge of getting her sister’s teeth brushed and reading her to sleep. The older girl never slept in her own bed, always just stayed beside her sister until their mother was home. Sometimes, when the mother came in, she would get the girls up in their nightgowns, the night still in the windows, and sprinklers spitting in the courtyard, and she’d smell of vodka and smoke and money, and would put music on too loud and they’d all dance. Their mother would smoke cigarettes and fry up eggs and pancakes that she’d top with strawberry ice cream. She’d talk about the other women she worked with: idiots, she called them. Skanks. She didn’t trust other women. They were all backstabbing bitches who’d rob you sooner than help you. She liked men. Men were easy. You knew where you were with men. Women were too complicated. You always had to guess. You couldn’t give them an inch or they’d ruin you, she said.
    Before they came to Fort Lauderdale’s blazing sun, they had been in Traverse City, where the older girl remembered only cherries and frozen fingers.
    Before Traverse City, San Jose with its huge aloe plants and the laundromat below their apartment chugging all day.
    Before San Jose, Brookline, where the little sister came to them in a tiny blanket of blue and pink stripes, a cocked hat.
    Before Brookline, Phoenix, where they lived with a man who may have been the little sister’s father.
    Before Phoenix, she was too small to remember. Or maybe there was nothing.
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    The morning was painfully clear. Once, at Goodwill, the mother had found a glass that she rang with a fingernail, and the glass sang in a high and perfect voice. The sunlight was like that after the storm.
    There was nobody to tell them not to, so they ate grape jelly with spoons for breakfast. They watched Snow White on the VCR again.
    The dog whimpered at the door. He had a little pad in the bathroom where he did his business. Melanie’s so damn lazy, their mother had muttered when she first saw the pad. What a lazy bitch. But maybe, the older sister thought, the dog just needed a little air. She got up and put his pink leash on and let him out. The dog went down the steps so fast that he pulled the leash out of her hand. He looked back at the girl, and she could see the gears turning in his head, then he sped off into the woods. She called for him, but he wouldn’t come.
    She went inside and didn’t tell her sister what had happened. It wasn’t until dinner—tuna fish and crackers and cheese—that the little sister looked around and said, Where’s the dog?
    The older sister shrugged and said, I think he ran off.
    The little sister started crying, and both girls went outside with a bowl of water and a can of tuna and opened it and called and called for the dog. He trotted out of the forest. There were sticks in his fur and mud on his belly, but he looked happy. He wouldn’t come near the girls, only growled until they went inside and then watched them through the screen door as he gulped down his food. The older sister lunged out the door and tried to grab his leash, but he was too fast and disappeared again.
    The little girl stopped crying only when her sister brought out Melanie’s cookies. Don’t you touch my damn Oreos, she’d said to them, but she wasn’t around to yell now. They ate them all.
    Late at night, there was a terrible grinding sound, and the girls went outside with flashlights and looked at the air-conditioning unit and saw that a brown snake had fallen into it from the palm trees; with every turn of the blade, a millimeter more of the snake was being eaten by the fan. They watched the snake dissolve bit by bit until the skin fell all the way through and lay, empty of meat, on the ground.
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    The girls woke up sticky and hot. The air-conditioning had died sometime before