Durable Goods Read Online Free PDF Page B

nearby eating that grass, making the satisfying sounds that horses do. I rip some grass up with my hand, a little imitation.
    “Do you like horses, Dad?” I ask.
    “I guess.”
    “Do you think we could ever get one?”
    He shrugs. “Oh, who knows?” It’s not mean, how he says it. It is low and easy, from a rare place.
    Once, shortly after my mother died, he was being this way; and he asked me to sing for him. I told him I would if he wouldn’t look. So he lay on his bed with his handkerchief over his face while I sat on the chair and sang “Beautiful Dreamer.” When I was through I sat quietly, waiting for him to say something. But he didn’t. I saw the small rise and fall of the handkerchief as he breathed. When, finally, I got up to leave, he said, “Katie.”
    “Yes?”
    He pulled the handkerchief off his face. “That was good.” There were tears in the corners of his eyes. They caught the light of the sun, sinking in the sky outside his window.
    I could hardly stand it. I said, “Thank you,” and fled. I’d heard it, too: my mother singing, out of my mouth.
    “Dad?” I say.
    “Yeah.”
    “What did Mom die from? What happened to her?”
    “Cancer. You know that.”
    “I know. But what happened exactly that made her die?”
    There is a long silence. Then he clears his throat and says, “I am not prepared to talk about that now.”
    “But you will be sometime?”
    “Go to bed, Katie.”
    I go to my room, and he stays outside. I watch him from my window, lying on his back, his arms under his head, looking up into the sky as though he is searching. I look up, too, and find the same thing: everything, written in a language we just don’t understand. My mother sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched cup of coffee before her, her head in her hands. “I don’t know,” she is saying softly. “I just don’t know.”
    B ubba has found Cherylanne’s and my secret basket. Some time ago, we strung a rope between our two hall windows, over the porch roof that connects our houses to each other. We send messages back and forth in an old Easter basket, yellow and green and still smelling faintly of chocolate. We have long yellow yarn pulls on either side of the basket.
    “What the hell do you need that for?” Diane asked when she found out we had built it.
    “Messages,” I told her, and truly I expected her to understand.
    “You can’t hardly breathe in one of these houses without someone next door hearing you,” Diane said.
    “That’s why we need it,” I said. This was not strictly true. The last message I sent Cherylanne had said, “What are you having for dinner tonight?”
    Diane had frowned. We’d been doing the dishes. I liked to watch the way she plunged the soapy rag into the glasses, wiped around and aroundon the plates until they squeaked, squeezed hard against the messy tongs of the forks so that they came out clean and shiny. I couldn’t wait to be the washer: so much variety, control of the bubbles. For now, I had to be the wiper. “Put this message in your basket,” Diane had said. And then she sang softly in her flirty voice, “I hear the cotton woods whispering above.” I sang back sincerely, “Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love.” Diane was always Tammy; I was always the chorus. You can expect that when you are the wiper.
    But now Cherylanne’s brother has found our basket and is wearing it around on his head. He has tied the yellow yarn pulls into a bow under his chin. “Don’t you love my new chapeau?” he asks Cherylanne. And then, “Man, you act like a five-year-old!” He has a barklike laugh, cruel and stupid sounding.
    “You don’t know a thing about it,” Cherylanne says. “You don’t know what we do with that basket.”
    “Espionage, I suppose,” he says.
    “Let’s go,” Cherylanne tells me, and slams out the front door. Once outside, she asks, “What’s espionage?”
    “James Bond,” I say. “Spies.”
    “Well,” she says, midway between