Suitable Precautions by Laura Boudreau Read Free Book Online Page B

universe hummed, that if we heard everybody’s heartbeats, all at once, it would sound like the buzzing of a beehive. “We’re all connected,” she said.
    â€œBut what if you don’t have a heartbeat?” I asked. “What about all the dead people?”
    â€œI watched a show about bees,” Nate said. “If you put a box of them in the freezer, they clump around the queen to keep her warm. After a few hours, you have this pile of dead bees.”
    â€œWere they killer bees?” my mother said. “Good hygiene is as important as a clear conscience.”

    My mother spun the steering wheel with the flat of one hand and leaned over to pop out the Stevie Wonder tape as we turned into our driveway. Nate was already unbuckling his seatbelt when my mother—“Oh shit,” she said—swerved and jammed the brakes. The car lurched, hard, and Nate slammed into the back of the passenger seat. There was the hollow thud of metal hitting something softer than itself, and then right away a kind of shriek that at first I thought was Nate, and then I thought was my mother, my mother who wasn’t like any other mother, no matter what Nate said, but then the shriek came again, from outside the car, again and again, until it died away and became softer, deeper, more like a humming.
    â€œOh shit,” my mother said again. She took the keys out of the ignition. We got out of the car.
    It wasn’t actually a hum at all, once we heard it better. It was more of a phlegmy growl, a snuffling, and it was so steady that it didn’t seem to matter if Mickey was breathing in or breathing out, and for a second I didn’t think she was doing either. Her back legs were bent towards her tail and her feet were bleeding. Part of one leg was skinned. The muscle was pink and twitchy and looked like the kind of thing my mother refused to buy in chain grocery stores. Our front bumper was fine, but there was a strip of skin hanging underneath the car.
    â€œNate, get the toboggan,” my mother said calmly, bending down and stroking Mickey’s head with two fingers. But Nate stood there, fiddling with the car door handle, staring at Mickey as she groaned and licked my mother’s wrist. “Nate.” He slammed the door and took off for the garage. “Elaine, get the towel out of the trunk.”

    Nate ran with the toboggan scraping behind him on the asphalt. We lined it up beside Mickey and I laid the towel out over its wooden slats. My mother grabbed Mickey around the chest and hauled her up, letting her legs hang. “Jesus,” she said, doing a power squat. Mickey shook as my mother lowered her onto the toboggan. Mickey’s tongue hung out of her mouth. She was shivering and panting. I wrapped her in the towel and her legs felt like bags of loose marbles. The blood leaked through the pink flamingo and turned it orange.
    My mother dragged the toboggan to Mr. Crisander’s and Nate and I walked beside, each of us with a steadying hand on Mickey to make sure she didn’t fall off. Mickey made squeaking noises when we tried to tilt the toboggan up the steps, and we decided that was a bad idea. My mother went up on the porch to ring the doorbell and I sat beside Mickey, keeping her company and whispering in her ear that she was a good girl, such a good girl, while she pawed at my arm with one of her front hooves. Nate got a stick and went back to the car. He started poking gently at the swinging skin. My mother rang the doorbell again and we waited. Then she knocked.
    â€œIf he’s not home,” she said, “we’re going to have to take care of this ourselves.” She watched me stroke gently under Mickey’s chin with one finger. “Look at her.”
    I patted Mickey, pressing on her chest softly until I felt the fluttering of her heart and she let out a little grunt. This was taking care of her, I thought, wrapping her in a beach towel and