Like Family by Paula McLain Read Free Book Online Page A

poor things,” she said, the words coming in high whiny puffs, the way people talk to kittens
     in cardboard boxes in front of the Safeway. She must have thought we were starving. We played prisoner with the cake, scooting
     to hang our legs all the way through the iron rods of the balcony. We stuck our arms out too so that we had to reach back
     through to eat. We
were
starving, we decided; the cake wasn’t cake but bread, and the only thing we were going to get all day, or for a long time
     anyway, and it was good that way, better.
    Through the door to our apartment we could hear the vacuum running. It made one noise, pitched up and spinning, because it
     wasn’t moving on the carpet; it wasn’t cleaning anything. Teresa said Mom turned it on because she didn’t want us to hear
     her with Roger. Sometimes her gravelly laugh came through the door too, but mostly there was just the vacuum, pulling air
     in that same spot. If our dad had come home right then, Mom and Roger would have been in big trouble, but we knew he wouldn’t.
     When he was there, he was there, and then not — going the way a good day went, so that we didn’t know if we’d see it again,
     that white cake, the sky with clouds pushed into meringue and the voices next-door singing Happy Birthday to dear Anna.
    When our dad
was
around, a lot of napping happened, theirs and ours. The apartment was a cave then, with all the bed room doors closed and
     the shades drawn so it was hard to know just how long any afternoon was or would be. As the oldest by seventeen months, Teresa
     had her own bedroom, but Penny and I shared a double bed and a view of the ceiling, which was flecked with glitter meant to
     look like stars. Sometimes we actually slept, but mostly we had staring contests, kicked at each other under the blue sheet,
     or raided our own dressers to put leotards on our heads and socks on our hands. We dropped to the floor and crawled through
     the house. If our mom was asleep on the couch, we’d watch her — her hair squashed like a nest, her arms like cooked spaghetti
     — and silently dare each other to touch her, an earring or toenail or the pocket of her bathrobe where she kept cigarettes
     and safety pins and tissues balled like baby animals.
    On one of those afternoons, there was a fire in the ditch behind our apartment complex. Penny and I were in bed but awake,
     and I watched her gray eyes widen as the fire engine drew nearer and nearer, its siren like a yo-yo, climbing and sliding.
     When it couldn’t get any louder, the sound stopped. We stood on our pillows and opened the curtains to see the truck, shiny
     and close, and the firefighters in yellow slickers and knee-high boots. Even with the window closed, we could hear them shouting
     at one another and the sound the hose made as it came off the truck and folded out of itself. The fire was mostly hidden from
     us by a length of fence, but we could see smoke rush up in plumes and hear the flames snapping through dry grass and whooshing
     a little as the fire line leaped ahead. There was another sound too, as if the blaze were chewing, spitting out what it couldn’t
     swallow.
    Penny said we should sneak out the window, but I said no. I took her hand, and we walked right through the front door in our
     bare feet, believing we couldn’t possibly get in trouble. This was a fire, after all, and as close as it could get without
     really happening
to
us. Many of our neighbors had come out too, and we all stood in a line on the sidewalk, the way people watch a parade. When
     it was over, the ditch was steaming and wet; black patches pawed up the sides. The firemen retreated, and the neighbors and
     Penny and I walked back the long way.
    Inside, it was still nap time. A fan in the living room blew into a set of blinds so that they ticked in a rhythm like typing.
     Other than that, the apartment was quiet. I tiptoed to my parents’ room and cracked their door. They’d tucked a blanket