Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

up on the Romantic poets, who were in Larque’s opinion a bunch of self-kissing hyperventilating assholes. This opinion she had never voiced to her mother, who tended, like Wordsworth and Shelley, to become overwrought.
    At this moment Florrie reminded her of a gift-shop porcelain Buddha, right down to the apple-cheeked smirk. Sweet enough to make a person’s stomach hurt.
    Larque walked around the Buddha, heading for a kitchen chair—and there, crouched sulkily between a blocky plaid love seat and the wall, was Sky.
    â€œYou’re here!” Larque exclaimed.
    â€œOf course, dear.” Her mother rolled to her knees and got up, so short-legged she could hoist herself off the floor by using her hands, with her round bottom in the air, like a toddler. “I never get out of here before noon.” The little woman, not much more than four feet tall, shuffled ducklike in wide polyester pants toward the microwave. “Had your coffee, kiddo? You’re the early bird today.”
    Hugely relieved to have found her missing doppelganger, Larque didn’t even mind yet another bird wisecrack. “No,” she babbled, “no, but—I mean her. Sky. How long has she been hiding out here with you?”
    â€œDear? What are you talking about?”
    â€œDon’t you see her? One of my damn doppelgangers is skulking behind your sofa.”
    Sky frowned fiercely and scrooched against the wall.
    â€œReally?” Florrie blinked serenely at the indicated spot. “No, dear, can’t say I do.” She continued toward the microwave.
    Sky looked rumpled and runny-nosed and quite grubby, being gray all over with Florrie’s crud-of-ages house dirt. Apparently, however, Sky did not perceive herself as wretched. She glared daggers of defiance at Larque. “I am not coming home with you,” she declared.
    Such statements from children were best ignored. Anyway, something bizarre was happening. Larque appealed to her mother, “Don’t you hear her either?” What was the matter? Florrie had never shown any trouble seeing, say, the ghosts of babies past that occasionally followed Jason and Jeremy and Rodd around.
    Over a cup of tap water her mother looked at her blankly and blinked again. “I should be hearing something?”
    â€œNever mind.” When Florrie blinked like that it meant the world was too much with her, late and soon. As long as Larque had known her, Florrie had possessed a disconcerting ability to blink things away, to make unpleasantness cease to exist in her world by simply, briefly, shutting her eyes. And it was a good idea to allow her this sleight. Cornered by unwelcome reality, Florrie tended to go to pieces in a colossal way.
    Her maiden name, which she had taken back after the divorce, was Lawrence. It had sometimes in sympathetic moments seemed to Larque that being named Florence Lawrence was sufficient excuse for all her mother’s eccentricities, including her affection for sentimental poetry and its painful rhymes.
    The microwave turntable whirred. Getting out the Folger’s Crystals, Florrie hummed along with it, Larque, in effect talking to herself, said grimly to Sky, “I’m sorry. You are not a damn doppelganger, just a doppelganger. And I shouldn’t have hit you. I’ve been looking all over the place for you.”
    â€œYou still don’t like me.”
    Larque evaded that. “Why did you come here?”
    â€œDear,” Florrie sang across the room, “have one of these.” It was a summons best obeyed. Larque went over to the table and found, sitting on her saucer alongside her hot water, a suit-button–sized pill that appeared to have been pressed together out of wood chips.
    She stalled for time by sitting down and fixing her coffee. “One of what?”
    â€œIt’s a Nutri-Salvation wafer, dear. Ascorbic acid, bee pollen, fiber, everything you need. I eat them for breakfast, and some