Christine Read Online Free PDF

overall feeling it left me with was disturbing. As best I remember, she started out by accusing me of not watching him closely enough—as if Arnie were much younger instead of almost exactly my own age—and ended up saying (or seeming to say) that it should have been me.
    This sounded like the same thing all over again— Dennis, you weren ’t watching him closely enough —and I got angry myself. My wariness of Regina was probably only part of it, and to be completely honest, probably only the small part. When you’re a kid (and after all, what is seventeen but the outermost limit of kidhood?), you tend to be on the side of other kids. You know with a strong and unerring instinct that if you don’t bulldoze down a few fences and knock some gates flat, your folks—out of the best of intentions—would be happy to keep you in the kid corral forever.
    I got angry, but I held onto it as well as I could.
    â€œI didn’t let him do anything,” I said. “He wanted it, he bought it.” Earlier I might have told them that he had done no more than lay down a deposit, but I wasn’t going to do that now. Now I had my back up. “I tried to talk him out of it, in fact.”
    â€œI doubt if you tried very hard,” Regina shot back. She might as well have come out and said Don’t bullshit me, Dennis, I know you were in it together. There was a flush on her high cheekbones, and her eyes were throwing off sparks. She was trying to make me feel eight again, and not doing too bad a job. But I fought it.
    â€œYou know, if you got all the facts, you’d see this isn’t much to get hot under the collar about. He bought it for two hundred and fifty dollars, and—”
    â€œTwo hundred and fifty dollars!” Michael broke in. “What kind of car can you get for two hundred and fifty dollars?” His previous uncomfortable disassociation- -if that’s what it had been, and not just simple shock at the sound of his quiet son’s voice raised in protest- -was gone. It was the price of the car that had gotten to him. And he looked at his son with an open contempt that sickened me a little. I’d like to have kids myself someday, and if I do, I hope I can leave that particular expression out of my repertoire.
    I kept telling myself to just stay cool, that it wasn’t my affair or my fight, nothing to get hot under the collar about . . . but the cake I had eaten was sitting in the center of my stomach in a large sticky glob and my skin felt too hot. The Cunninghams had been my second family since I was a little kid, and I could feel all the distressing physical symptoms of a family quarrel inside myself.
    â€œYou can learn a lot about cars when you’re fixing up an old one,” I said. I suddenly sounded like a loony imitation of LeBay to myself. “And it’ll take a lot of work before it’s even street-legal.” (If it ever is, I thought.) “You could look at it as a . . . a hobby . . .”
    â€œI look upon it as madness,” Regina said.
    Suddenly I just wanted to get out. I suppose that if the emotional vibrations in the room hadn’t been getting so heavy, I might have found it funny. I had somehow gotten into the position of defending Arnie’s car when I thought the whole thing was preposterous to begin with.
    â€œWhatever you say,” I muttered. “Just leave me out of it. I’m going home.”
    â€œGood,” Regina snapped.
    â€œThat’s it,” Arnie said tonelessly. He stood up. “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”
    Regina gasped, and Michael blinked as if he had been slapped.
    â€œWhat did you say?” Regina managed. “What did you—”
    â€œI don’t get what you’re so upset about,” Arnie told them in an eerie, controlled voice, “but I’m not going to stick around and listen to a lot of craziness from