Split by Lisa Michaels Read Free Book Online Page A

dust-bowl homesteading, Mother and Jim decided that the town was worth sticking to, so they looked around for a place to stay. A few doors down from the store, we came upon a cluster of paint-blistered bungalows with ivy growing through the walls. Up on one roof, a sign lettered around the rim of a wagon wheel said "Madge's Wheel-In Motel," the word
motel
drooping down as if Madge had painted it herself when she was three sheets to the wind. There was a big dirt parking lot in front, and a few scruffy kids played in front of the doorways. Mother and Jim decided to ask if we could rent a room. Parking the mail truck on someone's land was unlikely to make a good impression on our future neighbors.
    We made our way to the main building, where a dead neon "Office" sign pointed up a flight of darkened stairs. Through the slats in a fence beside the entrance, I caught a glimpse of a small pool, surrounded by decaying lawn furniture. A little trap door with the word
snacks
scrawled over it was set low in a stucco wall. I liked the look of the place right away. And it has become fixed in my mind, our first visit overlaid with the many summer days I would spend there, clinging to the sides of the pool, dog-paddling around the dead wasps, listening to Donny and Marie piped from a tinny loudspeaker.
    We knocked on a door at the top of the stairs, and Madge swung it wide with a grand "How do?" She was a buxom gravel-voiced lady with a peroxide-blond hive above her forehead and a Lucky Strike stuck in her fist like a sixth finger. Her apartment was surprisingly airy, with white carpeting and glass shelves packed with Hummel figurines and crystal paperweights. Mother and Jim asked about a room, saying they planned to stay awhile. Madge looked them over: "I don't got a room, but I got a piece of property for sale down the street."
    Back down in the driveway, Madge hopped on the running board of the mail truck and directed us down Spring Street, hanging on to the rear-view mirror with one hand. "It's just a stone's throw," she yelled as we passed a post office, two churches, and a filling station with old white pumps as smooth as tombstones. She had us pull up at a clapboard house on the corner. Beside it was a duplex with cracked stucco siding and tiny sagging porches. There were a handful of ramshackle sheds on the property and a few rusted cars in the driveway. The yard was nothing but thistle and dry grass.
    "Well, this is it," Madge said. "It ain't much."
    Mother and Jim took a look around inside the buildings. Later, Mother would say that you had to call the people who lived there homeless. Only two out of the four toilets worked. The ceiling plaster bloomed with stains. Mother and Jim dickered with Madge a little, and agreed to buy the place for eighteen thousand dollars. The down payment, which they had carefully guarded during their travels, was the last bit of largess from my great-grandmother, the widow of a wildly successful bonds lawyer.
    Our new address was 12000 Spring Street. Apparently the town's founders had been anticipating an explosive growth period that never arrived. Just past our house, the only sidewalk in town ceased abruptly, the last slab jutting out toward the cow pastures and orchards down Old Dam Road. We would hold down the end of the main drag on about an acre of good river-valley soil gone hard from neglect.
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    All the apartments were full when we took title to the place, so we lived in the mail truck for a while. Mom and Jim told the Riders, who lived in the back half of the big house, that they would have to move out, but there was no hurry. We were happy to live in the truck until they found a suitable place.
    The front half of the big house was rented by an elderly woodcutter named Floyd Root, who sat around in his undershirt drinking gin. In the evenings, he had a lot of visitors: Indians from the reservation up in Covelo, old logging buddies. Floyd lived amid heaps of moldering newspapers, dirty