Split by Lisa Michaels Read Free Book Online Page B

underwear, and assorted chain saws, but his guests would pull up a stack of magazines and make themselves easy, playing cards into the night.
    When Floyd heard that we were living in the truck until the Riders resettled, he called my mother to his porch. "They don't have to move," he told her.
    My mother explained that we were in no rush to force them out.
    "There's no need," he said, giving her a rheumy-eyed stare. "I'm going to die soon, and then there will be a place for you folks."
    Mother brushed this off, but his flat tone spooked her.
    A week later, Floyd invited his friends over and made great ceremony of giving away his saws and gap-tongued logging boots. The next morning, Jim saw Floyd's papers untouched on the porch and, after knocking didn't rouse him, went in to find the man lying cold in his bed, three empty gin bottles lined up neatly on the floor.
    It took us a week of scrubbing to make that place fit to live in. There was standing water in the sink that the neighbor told us hadn't been drained for six months. Mother snaked the drain, lined the musty drawers with butcher paper, and sewed batik curtains for the windows. In the bedroom, the wallpaper hung in thick tatters, a yellowed flowery print laced with ribbons. We pulled that down and found a layer of cheesecloth tacked beneath it, and when that was stripped away, solid foot-wide redwood planks, rough-planed from trees that must have been over five hundred years old.
    I was given Floyd's bedroom. Mother and Jim slept in the living room on a platform bed that doubled as a couch. I was not yet five, and it was summer, so I had to go to bed before the sun went down, which felt like exile from the world of light. While the air outside turned gold, I would press my face against the screen and watch the older neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street. One evening, not long after we had moved into the house, Mother and Jim came to tuck me in, and the two of them lingered for a while. Mother sat on the edge of my bed and sang to me. Jim stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out the western window at the torn-up yard, the bristle of cattails in the ditch, and the corrugated roof of Earl's welding garage across the street, where he went every afternoon to buy glass bottles of Coke from the vending machine.
    The novelty of the two of them tucking me in together in my very own bedroom set me humming with pleasure, and I wanted to say something in honor of this, but I didn't dare break their reverie. Even as I lay there, mute with happiness, I was conscious of the fragility of the scene: two parents, one child, pausing for a few moments together under one roof at the day's end.
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    We soon got to know our neighbors, who through Floyd's gentlemanly exit were allowed to remain in the back half of the house. Jackie Rider was full-blooded Choctaw, with unnerving composure and striking beauty that she didn't make much of: hair as shiny as obsidian, high cheekbones, and almond eyes. She padded around the house barefoot and wore faded Levi's that hugged her narrow hips. Jackie was in nursing school, and worked a night-shift job. Her husband, Roger—whom my parents called Roger Dodger—was blond and bearded and worked as a lumberjack. Roger often spent his evenings at the bar down by Hunter's Store, where men stopped by during deer season to load up on beer and bullets, their four-wheel-drives spattered with mud, their gun racks full.
    The Riders had two kids, a son named Jacob and a daughter, Alison, who was my age. She and I became instant friends. In the scorching afternoons, we would walk down to Madge's Motel and pay ten cents to swim in the pool. When Madge wasn't upstairs sleeping off a bender, she would lean her head out of the snack door and peddle stale Fritos and orange pop. We'd spend change filched from our mothers' purses on red licorice, splash around the shallow end, and then dry ourselves facedown on the hot