A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries Read Online Free PDF Page A

crawled toward him with the suitcase dragging beside him. He put it down on my father’s lap, over the sheet, and said, “C’est pour vous.”
    “For me?” my father said.
    “ Pour vous .”
    “Are you sure? My God, Ben-wa, that’s the nicest present I’ve ever gotten in my life.” My father unzipped the little suitcase and peered inside. In it was everything the little brother had arrived with, including the plaid suit he had been wearing.
    In French, the little brother said, “I want to call myself little Bill.”
    “Little Bill? Billy. All right.” My father’s voice went quiet.
    “Billy Anthony Willis,” my mother said. “How’s that, everybody? All right?”
    “Billy,” the little brother said.
    “Isn’t that something? I’ve hated that name all my life and he wants my name.”
    “Billy! Billy!” I said, jumping up and down on the bed. The cups jiggled on their saucers, my mother grabbed the tray and steadied it. She did not reprimand me
    “I just have this feeling,” she said in her gravelly voice, “I really had no idea but now I think everything’s going to be all right.”
    I see the rich velvety colors of the curtains and bedspread and the antique bedside lamps bathing us in amber light. I see the little brother’s flushed and smiling face, his sweet blue eyes all watery, and the dark space glinting between his front teeth.
    We had our first four-way kiss. The little brother put one arm around my father’s neck and one around my mother’s. I was on the other side. Our four mouths came together in a loud smack.
    The happiness I felt did not last through the day, nor did it return the next day, but at the moment of the four-way kiss I was happy that he was mine and that I was his. For a short moment, I was almost in love with him, for he was certainly brave, much more so that I would ever be, and had somehow found it possible to forgive me.

A SOLDIER’S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES
    I sat down at the top of the metro steps in the pouring rain, cringing as sudden blasts of wind slapped the rain against my face. The ground rumbled beneath me. It was the next train pulling in. I heard its doors slide open, and thirty seconds later a crowd of cranky French people came rushing up the stairs. It was just past five o’clock and everyone wanted to get home as fast as possible except me. The French people pushed and shoved and grumbled aloud, “Quel temps de chien.”
    I watched a man in a suit push a woman out of the way as he climbed the stairs. The woman yelled, “ Ah, ça, alors! Merde !” and swung her handbag, hitting the man across the face. He turned back and called her a putain . He ran on up toward me and stepped on my gray uniform skirt, smearing mud all over the pleats.
    “And what the hell are you doing sitting there!” he shouted. “You want to catch the grippe ?”
    I refused to look up. Instead, I tried to wipe the mud off my skirt. One after another, four more trains rumbled in. One fat woman’s high heel speared my shoe at the instep, grazing the skin. The scratch stung pretty badly, but would not bleed in a dramatic way at all.
    I felt terribly sorry for myself and wanted to fall ill or have an accident before I reached home. I’d had pneumonia once, three years ago, and I remembered that in the red haze of my fever the entire household had come to a standstill. My father had held my hand while I lay facedown on my parents’ bed and the doctor gave me a shot in the behind. My father said in a gentle voice that if I relaxed my muscles the shot wouldn’t hurt and he’d been right. I had been so sick that he’d even given up work for one whole day to watch over me personally.
    What I needed now was to come down with a serious high fever like that one, before I had to face my father.
    I picked up my cartable , heavy with exercise books, and stood. I wiped the itchy gravelly dirt off the backs of my legs and opened my navy-blue blazer. At the curb I stood in the gutter while