We Live in Water by Jess Walter Read Free Book Online

wall. What the hell is a blue oyster cult? She’s probably smoking pot.
    But a thief?
    Asleep she looks like she’s never had a bad thought in her life.
    She was the first, when Wayne was still in the navy. Closed her tiny red hand around his pinky and Wayne thought: What the hell have I done ? That tightness in his chest. He was nineteen. Only five years older than she is now. Last summer someone stole a few of his Pall Malls, and although he never caught her with the smokes, she was his prime suspect then, too.
    Wayne eases the door closed, steps down the hall to the boys’ room. Little and Middle, nine and eleven, splayed on twin beds like they were dropped fifty feet. The Little one could be it out of temperament alone. He’s a hoarder, a brooder. Dark eyes like his mother. Looks up from his Legos like you interrupted church. Kid didn’t say a word until he was four and then it was a full sentence: “I want more applesauce now.” Acts like he’s never had an entire meal. Pockets food during dinner, squirrels Halloween candy in dresser drawers, carries acorns around in his mouth. By personality, it could be the Little one. He’s got that want thing in his eyes. The want Wayne sometimes gets.
    On the top bunk, the Middle one mutters in his sleep. Milkman’s kid, Wayne always joked, not just because he’s blond, but because he’s so different from Wayne. He hates to say it about his own kid, but the Middle one’s a pussy. Falls down and gets hurt, wrecks his bike and cries and pisses his pants (at eleven?), plays chess and always has his head in a book and can’t seem to keep his goddamn finger out of his nose. “Hey,” he told the boy one time, “when you finally get whatever’s up there, let me know. I want to see it.” The kid just stared at him. The Middle one could be it just because Wayne has no idea what goes on in that head of his. He’s an alien.
    “Wayne?”
    Karen stands behind him in the hallway, white nightie, dark eyes squinting.
    “Hey baby.”
    “It’s two in the morning.”
    “Yeah, Ken and I had a couple after work.”
    “Come to bed.”
    “Did I ever tell you about our trip to Yellowstone when I was a kid? We stayed in these cabins at this Indian camp, least that’s what they called it. There was a creek to pan for gold and a field of arrowheads. My sister told me the gold and arrowheads were fake, that the people who ran the roadside deal planted them for us to find.” Wayne smiles at the memory. “My dad had to park on a hill every night to compression-start that old Ford of his. Imagine. My cranky old man driving around flat eastern Montana looking for a hill to park on.” But he can’t remember why he brought it up.
    “Just come to bed.”
    Wayne sighs and looks back at the boys. He’d have to go long odds on the Middle kid, six-to-one, out of ineptness alone, two-to-one on the Little boy, because of his sneaky personality. Even money on the Girl . . . just because.
    In the bedroom, Karen turns her tapered back to him, the straps of her nightgown just above the waterline of covers. Wayne takes his change out of his pockets. Two quarters, a dime, four pennies.
    Okay. Here we go. Every night after work, after the tavern, he drops his change in the Vacation Fund on their closet floor. The Vacation Fund is a gallon glass jar, a replica of an old rotgut whiskey jar, dark brown glass, wide at the bottom, narrow as a fifty-cent piece at the neck, with a glass finger-handle at the very top. When the jar is full, the family has enough money to take a vacation. Just like Wayne’s dad used to do it. Takes two years to fill the jar, two years to save enough for a summer car trip.
    When Wayne noticed that someone was stealing from the Vacation Fund, he started leaving traps. He’d tilt the jar till the change ran uphill, then come home and find the sea of coins flat. Or he’d turn the handle to six o’clock, come home and find the handle at four-thirty, the jar moved off its