Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

goddamn long. In the dream I tell it all, and I breathe like a baby. I forget to worry about the next breath, just trust it’s gonna come.
     
    Siddalee asks too many questions. I don’t know where the child gets those thoughts. She pins me to the wall with all the stuff she asks. Sometimes I wish she’d lose her voice. And sometimes I want to go and sit in front of her and ask her questions. I’d like to say: What do you want me to do? Tell me what to do—step by step—to get out of the mess we’re in here in this house.
    But I know it’s foolishness to think my little girl can pull me out of the swamp. I’m ashamed to even admit it. The child was born old, though, and it tempts you.
    Siddalee is the smart one. She’s the talker. Hell, she’s nothing but a kid and she’s already using words I never knew how to pronounce right. The child picks up new words everywhere she goes, comes home with them in her pocket. I still can’t believe Vivi and me produced something like her. Neither one of us are what you’d call Brains. Although God knows, my wife can sure run on at the mouth.
    Siddalee was barely in first grade when they said she had to have that eye operation. Almost paralyzed me just to hear about it. I got mad as hell at Viviane because the wandering eye came from her side of the family. It didn’t come from mine. Siddalee’s eye—the left one—was wandering off to the outside, making her see double. Hell, what’d people expect of me? People in this parish don’t get their eyes cut on. The damn operation had only been performed six or seven times in the world, and that was in places like Boston and what-have-you.
    I didn’t know what to do. Viviane had lived with it all her life and it hadn’t killed her. Hell, when her eye wandered at parties, men thought she was flirting with them. She used to make bets with people that she could see what was going on off to the side without turning her head. She made jokes about it, said she made her beer money in college taking bets in the dorm on what-all she could see with that eye.
    I just did not understand why we had to cut on my daughter’s eye. But Dr. Claude Hathaway told Vivi about this operation to correct it. Said he could go in there and take a little tuck in one of the muscles that were lazy and that’d do the trick. Siddalee’s eye would quit wandering and look straight ahead. Soon as Vivi heard about it, she just had to get it done right away. Just had to.
    I said, Well Vivi, why don’t we wait awhile, see if it doesn’t straighten itself out?
    You cheap sonovabitch! she hollered. It’s just like you to be too goddamn stingy with a nickel to fix your own daughter’s eye!
    I said, It’s not the goddamn money. I never been under the knife. None of my family has ever been under the knife.
    She wouldn’t listen to me. She didn’t know what I was thinking: I don’t want my little girl to come out blind or gouged up. I’m not cheap, I’m scared. It’s the story of my life: not stingy, just a goddamn coward.
    The whole time, Viviane and me fought like dogs. I didn’t think about my child, my hands were so full fighting her mother.
    Viviane handled it all. I’d never seen her like that, didn’t think she had it in her, taking charge like a man. She set up the hospital room, the doctor, jerked Siddalee out of school and put her up in St. Cecilia Hospital. Siddalee’s hair was that long red, almost to her waist, and she’d been wearing glasses since she was three, trying to correct that wandering eye.
    I wouldn’t have a thing to do with it.
    I told Viviane, This is on your head. If anything happens to that child, don’t come blaming me. You are the one that can’t live with the wandering eye. Siddalee’s wandering eye doesn’t bother me. I can live with the wandering eye.
    Viviane and her Mama took over. Buggy moved the four-poster bed into the living room and got it all ready for Siddalee to come home to recover in.
    Dr. Hathaway