Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey Read Free Book Online Page B

dear little kitten and an evil, no-good polecat were confined in the same cage simply because they belonged to the same family. There were times Dorrie was tempted to make to her parents what seemed like a perfectly reasonable request, that Phineas be sent somewhere else to live, that a foster home be found for him with people of his own kind. What did a person like Phineas have in common with Anna’s pressed wildflowers, the threadbare Oriental rug in the hall, Martin’s research on the names in Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, Dorrie’s place on the honor roll, the reproduction of Guernica on the dining room wall?
    And yet Dorrie had known forever that no matter what outrages he committed or virtues she cultivated, no matter how her mother cried when he slammed out of the house or her father sat at his desk with his head in his hands—no matter what, her parents would always prefer Phinny.
    â€œOh, you are something,” Anna said to him once after one of his dreadful crimes and his ingenious, hypocritical apology for it, and she enfolded him in a hug with a look of such fearful bliss on her face that Dorrie, who had been lurking in the vicinity, had to back away as if from a painful light.
    When Hugo thought of his father, he always remembered the last time he had seen him. He wished that day didn’t stick in his mind; he would much rather have remembered the day they had walked on the beach and picked up shells, or their drive to New Jersey to see his father’s friend Connie, who had a swimming pool, or any of the dozens of nice things they had done together that were fun or exciting or a little crazy, but not that last day at Rose’s.
    His father had drunk too much beer, for one thing. Also, he and Rose were smoking marijuana. Hugo hated it when they smoked. He hated the look of glee on his father’s face as he rolled a joint—though he admired the magical deftness with which he did it, and he liked the texture of the little paper squares his father gave him to play with; they would almost melt when he touched them with his tongue. But he hated the burning smell that was like cloth smoldering, and he hated the way they laughed at what wasn’t funny, and he hated it that, while they sat and smoked and laughed, his cousins were allowed to get away with more murder than usual. It was on one of those marijuana afternoons that Shane and Monty, tired of his tagging after them and his chatter, had forced him into the spiderwebbed old chicken house, padlocked the door, and then forgotten him, and no one heard him yelling until after it got dark.
    But on his father’s last visit, Shane and Monty were swimming at the reservoir with the Kushner boys, and Starr was at her friend Tammie’s house, and Rodney, the baby, was alternately sleeping and crying in his crib, and Hugo was sitting on the stone step outside the front door playing with Rodney’s Busy Box and listening to his father and Rose talking in the living room. Their voices were loud, then soft. “On the streets,” Rose said, and then, “Could be the big one,” and his father’s laugh—the shrill, crazy-sounding laugh that meant he was high.
    â€œI’ll tell you one thing, Rosita baby,” he said, and then Rose must have stood up because the chair and floor creaked so that Hugo didn’t catch what that one thing was. But then, clearly, he heard a match rasp and the sound of his father’s deep inhaling and then Rose’s, and then a pause, and finally his father’s voice again. “I can’t keep him with me, he just drags me down, Rose, how can I—” The high-pitched laugh came again: hee hee hee . “How can I do my fuckin’ job with a kid dragging at my heels?” And the two of them exploded with laughter.
    â€œYour fuckin’ job,” Rose said, squealing. They laughed for a long minute, cackling and gasping, and then they wound down,