Like Family by Paula McLain Read Free Book Online

keep us
     and care for us, how could perfect strangers do the job? Still, I nodded and chewed, ate up what Bonnie served, slept on her
     squeaky, creaky couch, waited like my sisters waited for the family that was coming along shortly, any day now, any day.
    Bonnie wasn’t a bit like her mother, but she had Granny’s habit of ending every third sentence with a small “Lord willing,”
     and there was a lot of God at her AA meetings, where she dragged us some three nights a week. It wasn’t unlike church, the
     way they sat in a circle of hard chairs, one person talking, the others nodding and saying, “Yes, yes.” My sisters and I mostly
     played outside or on and around the stacks of folding tables at the back of the meeting hall. Bonnie said we didn’t need to
     be hearing all those sad stories, but to me they were fascinating. Everyone there had hit rock bottom. They talked about it
     as if it were one very specific place, Rock Bottom, like Granny’s Limbo. Wives had been lost there, and jobs. They talked
     about it as if they still knew the way.
    Bonnie was a tired kind of pretty in her brown pantsuit and turtleneck, square-toed zip-up boots. Men were always trying to
     nuzzle up to her after meetings, but I never saw her do more than bum their cigarettes and pat them on the shoulder or knee
     with an even compassion. There were never any men in her apartment either, just us and the emptied cartons of Pall Malls and
     Patsy Cline on the turntable, falling, falling to pieces.
    On long afternoons when Bonnie was away at work, we’d run around the half-mile or so of sidewalk that snaked through her apartment
     complex. There was a neighbor boy named Chip who liked to pretend he was Penny’s pet monkey. He followed us everywhere, even
     into the laundry room, where we each folded ourselves into one of the front-loading washing machines, hiding from no one in
     particular. In my metal bubble, spaceship for one, I’d call, “Hellohellohello,” and let the alien translation come back at
     me in galvanized pings.
    The buildings in Bonnie’s complex were green, and it struck me that every apartment we’d ever lived in had been green — olive,
     avocado, artichoke — and the kind of stucco that could take the skin off the back of your hand. We moved often when our mom
     and dad were together, but it didn’t really matter since the buildings were so much alike and the days too, and none of them
     so different from our time with Bonnie.
    At Bonnie’s we waited for a family. When we still
had a
family, we waited for dinner, bath time,
Bonanza;
for our mother to wake up, for our father to come home from his latest “business trip.” Sometimes we waited on the balcony
     outside our apartment while our mom visited with Roger, the quiet, lanky brother of her friend Lynette. Roger just started
     showing up one day, smelling of pine needles and wearing a pressed white shirt, and soon this came to mean we were out — out
     for the afternoon with the door locked behind us. In that building, we lived on the second floor. Below us, in a sad-looking
     courtyard, there was a patio table missing its umbrella, some shedding red oleander and a bone-dry, dirty swimming pool. From
     the shallow end of the pool all the way to the drain, a long brown crack ran and ran, as thick as my foot in some places and
     in others like a spider’s thread, barely there. When we were outside, Teresa was the mom. Though only four or five then, she
     knew what was okay and what wasn’t. We could peel the banister like a banana, letting strings of rubbery paint slither to
     the cement. We could spit down into the courtyard, but we couldn’t go there or play in the empty pool; we couldn’t knock on
     our own door, even if we really wanted something, like a cookie, like shoes.
    One day, the lady next-door was having a birthday party. She came outside with three pieces of cake — white with white frosting
     — stacked on a paper napkin. “You