Bastards: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

made me nervous. As soon as I had it in my possession, that secret tugged at me to be told.
    I CAME close one early summer morning. Monique of the beautiful braids and coffee skin was coaching me how to walk like a TV lady. I was barefoot, wearing three of Monique’s belts, and swishing through the overgrown grass in front of my apartment on the balls of my feet. I imagined that I was wearing high heels while Monique demonstrated a slithering sway step on the pavement. In her white denim jacket and bright miniskirt, she looked like a model on a catwalk. I’d managed a lower-back swivel dramatic enough to keep Monique’s belts on my nonexistent hips (rather than slipping down my legs in a pile of vinyl like they had the first twenty-seven laps) and I sashayed right over a piece of broken window nestled like a land mine in the unmowed grass. My leg kicked up reflexively as pain shot up to my thigh. The glass was curved like a fishhook, cutting a jagged tear into the arch of my right foot. I hopped on my undamaged leg over to the curb to keep the glass from driving deeper into my flesh while Monique ran to dial the firemen.
    As I sat alone on the curb, a thought overtook me as swiftly as the glass had cut into my flesh: A sister would be a nice thing to have in a time like this. A little sister might have been practicing a TV walk with me, might hold my hand when Monique left to dial the firemen, could marvel with me at how the glass in my foot caught the sunlight like a diamond.
    The firemen arrived without sirens. The tall one located my mother while the freckled one bandaged my foot. Monique was beside me when the fireman said, “You’re gonna have a nice scar, kid.”
    Monique sat close and said, “A scar! I got one, too.” And she peeled up the sleeve of her white denim jacket to show me a dark raised spot on the inside of her left arm where her daddy had put out a cigarette when she was seven years old. And there it was: a pocket in the conversation that was the perfect size for my secret. It would have been easy. But suppose I told her and she looked at me like the lady had looked at my mom in the grocery store that day—startled, confused, fearful, judging? How would I feel then? Or suppose my mom found out that I told and was mad at me? I couldn’t risk it.
    The secret would build up a retaining wall against me and other people, cutting short the bonding moment that needed to happen in a friendship. No matter how close I got to people, I always held it back. But I would always know it was there, like the scar I now had on the sole of my right foot.
    A few months later my next little sister was born. The name on the crib read H ALL , but not for long, not forever.
    Her adoptive mother named her Meghan, just like she said she would.

The Secondhand Washing Machine
    T he autumn when I began first grade, Daddy started making regular, daytime appearances in Marigold Court. I didn’t know then—but would understand later—that my father had been paying late-night visits to our mother for a while, sleeping on the sofa in the living room while Jacob and I slumbered in the bedroom. Hence my long-lost sisters.
    Daddy had replaced the beige Oldsmobile with a royal blue Ford Pinto whose rumbling purr could be heard half a block away. When we heard the car sputter into the parking lot in front of our apartment, Jacob and I ran for our coats and shoes because days with Daddy were full of adventures. He never made special plans when he took charge of us. He was going to treat us like grown-ups, he said. So he took Jacob and me on whatever activity he had previously arranged for himself. Jacob and I would dig around the backseat of the Pinto, piecing together two full seat belts if we could, and Daddy would tell us about Jesus, the Son of God, who was a carpenter just like him, as we drove through town delivering cash to the guys on Daddy’s construction team. When he was invited to Christian ladies’ houses to talk about