Bastards: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

the window. My brother had taken to asking this question whenever we traveled anywhere.
    “No,” Mom said, “Daddy won’t be there.”
    When we stepped off the bus, Jacob was in a deep sulk. He cried that he was not hungry and wanted to go hooome . Mom told him it wouldn’t be long and he would get to eat french fries. The bus pulled away from the curb, its warm breath puffing against our ankles. We were two steps away from the bus stop when my brother gasped.
    “My beaaaaar!” Jacob screamed. “We have to go back!”
    Jacob looked down the street where the bus had lumbered away. We would never be able to catch it. I curled my hands into fists and rubbed my cheeks.
    Mom knelt down on the sidewalk to be eye level with my brother. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes were soft with sincerity. She didn’t try to make it better by offering a crappy grown-up assessment that it was just a bear and he could get another one. We couldn’t always afford dinner; there certainly wasn’t extra money lying around for new bears. Anyway, my brother didn’t want a new bear; he wanted his bear.
    Jacob’s fawn’s ear burned bright red as we walked up the street. He scuffed his feet along the sidewalk and twisted away from Mom and me. With the loss of the bear, the day had taken a turn. I was not hungry, either.
    We walked half a block to a diner. Inside, a blond woman waved to us from a booth. Mom slid the photos from the doctor’s office across the table to the woman. Her friend talked about getting ready for the Baby. When was the Baby due, what had the doctor said about the Baby?
    I was hot and there were too many french fries on my plate. I hadn’t noticed my mom’s belly before, and now it felt like a lie somehow, that big belly hiding for so long under her baggy shirts. I was bored and tired of all the fuss and if I heard “the Baby” one more time I was going to dump my french fries all over the table.
    We could never keep these little sisters, I had come to understand, because other people had more of everything. This blond woman owned a house in town and two on the shore. We didn’t have enough room, enough clothes, enough food or laps to sit on or hands to hold.
    The blond woman said they were thinking of names for the baby, Mark or Meghan or—
    “It’s a girl ,” I said into my plate of fries.
    My mom and the other woman looked at me.
    The woman smiled a warm smile that separated her from us.
    A few minutes later, we were headed home on the bus. My brother walked the whole aisle and looked in every seat, but there was no Tenderheart Care Bear.
    We stopped at the grocery store. I sat in the seat in the front of the grocery cart and Jacob spread out in the roomy bottom section. I worried over the picture of my little sister from the doctor’s office, rolled it around in my mind with Becky Jo and Lisa and Rebekah Two while Mom examined the milk labels.
    A grandmotherly woman brushed by our cart and waved at me.
    “I have four baby sisters,” I said to her.
    “Isn’t that nice,” she said to me as she unfolded her grocery list.
    “They don’t live with us,” I said.
    The woman looked up from her list and over her shoulder, suddenly wondering who I belonged to. My mom put the milk in the cart with my brother.
    “My Mary has a vivid imagination,” my mom said as she pushed our cart around the corner.
    On the short walk from the store to our apartment, my mom told me that we shouldn’t tell anyone else about the baby girls.
    “Why?” Jacob looked at the sidewalk in front of him.
    “Other people don’t . . . think like we do sometimes. They might not understand. If you want to talk about the baby girls, you can talk to me. But it’s better if we don’t talk to other people about them.”
    “Even Daddy?” Jacob said
    Mom was quiet for a moment.
    “Daddy is okay. You can talk to Daddy, too.”
    It was the first secret I had ever had; it felt luxurious to own something so important, but it also