Breaking and Entering Read Online Free PDF

tying a littlekid up, but it’s a long rope and you can feel how light it is and if we don’t, at night she just goes over to that beach. My baby’s just mesmerized by that beach, aren’t you baby? You’re my little turtle, aren’t you? Rosie’s little turtle. You just love those bright lights.”
    Rosie’s eyes filled with tears but then she drew them back somehow, they didn’t fall.
    Liberty sees Little Dot all the time now. She takes her to the supermarket and to water-ski shows and roller-rinks. She buys her crayons and Big Gulps. But Little Dot hurts herself more and more. She goes for days without speaking. Little Dot is her own small keeper, and she is alone with an aloneness so heavy that her self can hardly bear its weight. Liberty is not like a mother to her, Liberty knows that. She may even be adding to the terrible weight. Sometimes Liberty thinks that each moment she spends with Little Dot is like a stone she gives the child, a small stone added to other stones.
    It is Teddy to whom Liberty seems like a mother. “You could be my mother,” Teddy often says to Liberty. They both have brown eyes and are allergic to tomatoes. Liberty could easily be his mother, Teddy reasons, because he needs one and they like each other. His own mother is in California where she is in love with another woman, and Teddy lives with his father, Duane, his father’s four restored Mustangs and his father’s latest girlfriend, Janiella. They live in a modest cement-block house with an extensive attached garage on the same street along the same narrow river where Willie and Liberty live. Liberty first saw Teddy high in the banyan tree in their yard the day after they had moved into the house. She had wanted to rent the place because of the banyan tree, a tree of such magnificence that it had extinguished all vegetative life in its vicinity. The banyan was awesome with itsmany cement gray trunks and its pink pendent aerial roots. It was so beautiful it looked as though it belonged in heaven or hell, but certainly not on this earth in a seedy, failed subdivision in the state of Florida.
    Teddy had played in the tree for years.
    “There are twenty-eight places to sit or lie on in that tree,” Teddy told Liberty. He was too old now to play in the tree, he said, but he used it as a place to think. He would crawl around and think, or sit and think. Teddy is seven. Liberty sees him mostly at night, almost nightly, for Duane and Janiella like to go out. They like to get drunk, dance, and drive around.
    “Put this pony to bed at nine,” Duane would say, instructing Liberty in Teddy’s care, slapping his little boy on the back with such enthusiasm that the child would spin sideways.
    “Don’t let Little Dot play with that bowl and spoon too long,” Rosie would say, “it gets her too excited.”
    Teddy and Little Dot, they are Liberty’s children in this town, for this moment. But she and Willie will be moving on soon, and there will be another town, although she cannot visualize it. Another place has no shape for her, it is still nothing to her.

     
    The rain fell, swelling the Umbertons’ yard. A tree limb toppled with a crack.
    Liberty opened her eyes. A single light glowed dimly in the room that was papered with silver flowers. Clem had become bored with the pink pig. He dropped it back in the box and selected a squeaking carrot. Liberty could hear the jingling and clashing of the pinball machine. She went to the doorway and watched Willie playing. He stood with his arms claspedover his head while the ball, sent forth but undirected, continued to rocket off bumpers, to plunge down channels that would not have it, its ultimate fall checked again and again.
    “This thing is rigged for an awful lot of free games,” Willie said.
    “I want to get back tomorrow.” She pushed her hip against the machine and it stopped.
    “Don’t you like it here?” Willie asked.
    “Here? In the home of the tricky, comfy, rank-hearted