Y: A Novel by Marjorie Celona Read Free Book Online

like your mother, don’t you,” Harrison said. He crouched
     and asked the boy if he could join them for breakfast. He was twenty-five; my mother,
     seventeen. He smelled like horses, like cheap cologne, like mint. He had a raspy voice
     and some kind of shiny gel in his hair. His arms shone like they’d been oiled.
    Over breakfast, Harrison told my mother that he’d moved to town to be closer to his
     brother, Dominic. Before that, he’d been living in a boarding house in Abbotsford.
     He didn’t need to tell her that he’d been in jail for most of his teens and early
     twenties; he had a look about him that Yula knew well. She knew the overly muscled
     forearms. She knew the poorly done tattoos. The way he looked around, guiltily, every
     time they ran out of things to say.
    “I’ve always been a castaway,” Harrison said to her. “Don’t know what to do with myself
     in the world.”
    Mom’s Café was crowded and they had to share their table with two construction workers,
     who eyed Harrison when they sat down. Yula held Eugene on her lap and fed him bits
     of waffles with her fingers. The construction workers leered at her breasts when she
     leaned over to grab the syrup, and when Harrison saw this he pounded his fist on the
     table, sent the cutlery to the floor. Eugene wailed, but Yula found herself oddly
     sexually aroused. The men left the café and Harrison followed them outside, told Yula
     he’d be back in a minute. When he returned, his knuckles were bleeding. He wiped the
     blood on his napkin and looked at her with sweet eyes.
    “You know them?” he said. His face hardened.
    “No—never—I don’t.” She saw it then for the first time: his paranoia,his violence, his possessiveness. She saw other things, too: his sudden loyalty, his
     need to be loved. She reached for his hand.
    Harrison never asked about Eugene’s real father, not even when he moved into the cabin
     with Yula. Somehow Yula knew that whatever Harrison and his brother did for a living
     wasn’t legal, but she knew it was better not to care. He was good to her son. One
     night she heard him telling Eugene that if they spent enough time together, they’d
     develop a likeness. He put his face next to Eugene’s in the mirror and widened his
     lips, and Eugene pursed his. Yula took a Polaroid of them this way, and it stayed
     on their fridge forever.

III.
    o n my fifth birthday, I am adopted by a woman with a daughter of her own. We live on
     a one-way street in a beige town house in Fernwood, within walking distance of downtown
     and a block from the big stone high school. Hand-painted “Slow Down!” signs are stapled
     to the telephone poles, and a fat woman in a wheelchair sits outside her house all
     day shrieking at us. The fat woman is called a Block Parent, and we are supposed to
     run to her if we are ever in danger, but she is terrifying. Our town house is mashed
     together with six other town houses, all in a row, with a small parking lot in the
     back. There are no front or backyards here, no sidewalks even. Each floor of the town
     house is small. The rooms are tiny, with low ceilings, and warm. Every room smells
     like mushroom soup, except for the bathroom, which smells like Ivory soap.
    I have arrived with the following possessions: a backpack stuffed with two pairs of
     pants, two shirts, pajamas, a toothbrush, and seven pairs of underwear, one for each
     day of the week. I also have a big shoe box with me, which the social workers call
     my “treasure chest.” Inside, I keep the things I was found with: a Swiss Army Knife
     and a gray sweatshirt with thumbholes. I also have some photographs, taken in my various
     fosterhomes. I hide the treasure chest under the bed; I keep my clothes in the backpack,
     in case I have to leave again.
    Miranda, my new mom, is a cinnamon-colored woman who works as a Molly Maid and was
     once married to a man named Dell. Her bedroom is on the top floor of the town house,
     and