After the Night Read Online Free PDF

"Gotta piss," he announced, staggering to his feet and heading toward the front door.
    Faith’s movements were measured, her hands never faltering as she listened to the stream of urine spattering in front of the step, for everyone else who came in that night to tramp into the house. She would mop the floor first thing In the morning.
    Amos weaved back into the house. He hadn’t zipped his pants, she noticed, but at least his sex wasn’t exposed.
    "Goin’ to bed," he said, making his way toward the back room. Faith watched him stumble and right himself by bracing his hand on the doorframe. He didn’t undress, but fell across the bed as he was. When Renee came home and found Amos lying across the bed in his filthy clothes, she would raise hell and wake everyone in the house.
    Within minutes, Amos’s heavy snoring was echoing through the cramped shack.
    Faith immediately got up and went into the lean-to that had been built onto the back of the shack, which she shared with Jodie. Only Amos and Renee had an honest-to-goodness bed; all the rest of them had cots. She turned on the light, the single bare bulb glaring, and quickly changed into her nightgown. Then she pulled her book out from under the mattress. Now that Scottie was in bed and Amos passed out drunk, she would likely have a couple of peaceful hours before anyone else came home. Amos was always the first one home, but then he always got started first.
    She had learned not to hesitate when an opportunity for enjoyment presented itself, but to seize each moment. There were too few of them in her life for her to allow any to pass untasted. She loved books, and read anything that came to hand. There was something magical in the way words could be strung together and a whole new world fashioned by the arrangement. While reading she could leave this crowded shack far behind, and go to worlds filled with excitement and beauty and love. When she was reading, she was someone else in her mind, someone worthwhile, rather than one of the trashy Devlins.
    She had learned not to read in front of Pa or the boys, though. The least they did was make fun of her. Any one of them, in one of their meaner moods, was likely to snatch the book from her and throw it in the fire, or into the toilet, and laugh uproariously as if her frantic efforts to save it were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Renee would grumble about her wasting her time reading instead of doing her chores, but she wouldn’t do anything to the book. Jodie made fun of her sometimes, but in a careless, impatient way. She couldn’t understand for the life of her why Faith would rather stick her nose in a book than go out to have some fun.
    These precious moments alone, when she could read in peace, were the highlight of Faith’s day, unless she had happened to see Gray. Sometimes she thought that if she couldn’t read, just for a few minutes, she would go crazy and start screaming, and not be able to stop. But no matter what Pa did, no matter what she overheard someone say about her family, no matter what Russ and Nicky had been up to or how weak Scottie seemed, if she could open a book, she would lose herself in the pages.
    Tonight she had more than a few minutes free for reading, for losing herself in the pages of Rebecca. She settled on her cot and pulled out the candle that she kept under her bed. She lit the candle, positioned it just so, balanced on a crate to the right of the cot, and scooted so that her back was braced against the wall. The light from the candle, small as it was, was enough to offset the back glare of the light bulb and allow her to read without straining her eyes too much. One of these days, she promised herself, she would get a lamp. She imagined it, a real reading lamp that gave off soft, bright light. And she would have one of those wedge-shaped pillows to lean against.
    One of these days.
    It was almost midnight when she gave up the battle against her heavy eyelids. She hated to stop