The Girl in the Well Is Me by Karen Rivers Read Free Book Online Page B

cigarette was dangling there on her Mary Kay coral-­lipsticked lips like a fly stuck in flypaper. Mom sold Mary Kay back then. Every morning, she tried a different look, so she knew what she was selling. She doesn’t sell it anymore because she doesn’t have the time. She says it didn’t make enough money to count. But way back then was still Before. When Dad was the smoker, not Mom. Not usually, anyway. I’d hardly ever seen her with a cigarette, even though I knew she sometimes stunk like smoke. The only other time I remembered seeing her smoke was when Grandma had a heart attack and had to go to the hospital to have a stent put in. The cigarette looked weird and wrong, like she’d come into the room wearing Dad’s clothes.
Incongruous
is the word, I think. I don’t know why I know that word, why I remember that, when I don’t remember more important stuff, like (usually) my locker combination.
    Then she burst into tears.
    â€œOh, eff,” said Robby, even though we weren’t allowed to swear, or even come close to swearing. I gasped. I thought she was going to light into him. I thought she was going to yell at him for sure. But she didn’t. She just stood there, staring at us, but like she couldn’t even see us. Her eyes didn’t blink. I thought about zombies. I was deciding whether or not to be scared.
    I looked out the window through the mesh curtains, and saw the flashing red and blue lights on the police car in the driveway. My dad was being led toward it by two policemen who were talking in loud voices, yelling at him. He’d been mowing the lawn in the back, which was a big slope that was great for sledding but stunk for mowing. It was hard work, I guess. His concert T-­shirt was soaked with sweat. He had handcuffs on and his shiny bald head was hanging low, like someone guilty on CNN.
    â€œI didn’t do it!” he shouted to us as we stood there, gaping, on the front lawn where we had somehow found ourselves. They shoved him into the back of the cruiser like he was a bag of potatoes. Rotten ones. “I didn’t do it,” he screamed. He was forgetting his right to remain silent, it seemed like.
    Even then, I didn’t believe him. The sprinklers were on and they sprayed us with water as they twirled around like skaters on the newly cut lawn. Dad always started at the front and mowed it on the diagonal to look like diamond shapes. But none of us moved. We just got wet instead. The car started up and drove away with my dad in the backseat, his face pressed against the window, watching all of us standing there in the rainbow prisms of the water, right there on the perfect patterned grass. Mom’s cigarette eventually got so soggy it broke right in half. Then I guess we went in. I don’t remember much past that cigarette, dropping down onto the wet green lawn.
    I haven’t seen Dad since. Mom saw him a lot during the trial, but she said we couldn’t go because kids weren’t allowed. She said he looked “fine.” She said he was sooooo sorry he’d done it. She said that if he had to go to prison, he knew he deserved it and when he got out, everything would be OK again. She said he’d make it up to us.
    I didn’t believe that. I still don’t. You can’t ever believe liars. They lie.
    The trial went on for a long time. Eventually, Mom stopped talking to us about it at all. She tried so hard to make it “normal” that it was anything but. Like who cared what happened at school at lunch time? What difference did it make what I got on my times tables quiz? I asked her stuff about court and Dad and she asked me stuff about school, and neither of us answered anything and I stood in her room and ironed her clothes for her while she sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her feet. I don’t know why her feet hurt so much. It was like all the pain in her heart had just sunk down her legs and got stuck