Every Last One Read Online Free PDF

and tanning. Doesn’t that make me feel special? I think you should be nicer to Kiernan, Rubes,” she adds, cutting her eyes sideways toward me to make certain she is not giving too much away.
    “I am nice to him,” Ruby says.
    I start to fold towels in the adjacent mudroom, hoping that they’ll become talkative when I’m out of sight, but instead they begin a serious conversation about pedicure colors. Kiernan found a sky-blue tuxedo at the thrift store at which Ruby struck out on a dress. It came with a ruffled shirt, a cummerbund, and an enormous bow tie. Ruby says the bow tie looks like a butterfly. I know exactly what Kiernan will look like. He will look like JamesMcGhee, the boy who took me to my prom. He wore that selfsame tuxedo. I remember finding an old photograph of the two of us posed in front of two freestanding Styrofoam Corinthian pillars that had been set up in the hotel hallway and thinking what a good thing it was that the classic black tux had come back into style, and that the sort of Empire-waist dress I was wearing had gone out of fashion. Now Kiernan is wearing the blue tux, and Ruby and all her friends wear dresses with Empire waists. I am trying to learn to take nothing for granted.

It’s raining hard and I am parked at the curb, waiting for Max to be finished with his drum lesson. I’m so tired that I can’t tell whether my foggy vision is the rain, or lack of sleep. Through the fine mist thrown up by the water hitting my hood I can occasionally see a strange woosh of movement in the picture window on the second floor of the hardware-store building. Weeks ago I had to park across the street, and from there I could tell that the odd blur of movement was Max’s shaggy head. It’s why he doesn’t want to cut his hair. He hurls it around when he plays the drums, and a small smile pops the dimples I’ve seen so rarely in the past year. When Max’s voice began to change, so did his mood. Both are low most of the time. The students moving up from middle school to high school were asked to fill out a questionnaire. “Describe yourself in one word,” one of the questions said. Ruby said Max left the space blank. “Maybe he couldn’t come up with just one word,” I’d said. “Mommy, be real,” Ruby replied, shaking her head.
    “He looks like a homeless guy,” Glen says sometimes after Maxhas cleared his plate and put it in the sink, his bare feet silent on the kitchen floor. “I try to be tolerant.” Glen believes this, but it’s not really true. He confuses silence with tolerance. A young man came into his office to interview for a job as a part-time bookkeeper, and Glen almost didn’t talk to him because he had a shooting star tattooed on the back of his hand. He has turned out to be a hard worker, but most of the time, when Glen mentions him, he adds, “I hope he’s socking away his salary, because it’s going to cost him a couple thousand dollars when he decides to have that thing removed.”
    One night Ruby put down her fork and said, “Daddy, he probably has more than one. You just don’t see them. Most people who get inked have a saying: not where a judge can see it.”
    “You’d better not have any thoughts along those lines,” Glen said, his chin set sharp as an arrowhead.
    “Oh, Daddy,” Ruby said airily, twirling her spaghetti. “My body is a temple.”
    Max and Alex laughed in unison, the way they had when they were little. It made me happy to see them of one mind again for just a moment. They were never alike, even as infants, one bald and moonfaced, the other all eyes and long parentheses of legs, but when they were small they complemented each other. Max would build with Legos, and Alex would hand him the blocks. Alex would kick the soccer ball around the yard, and Max would go back into the woods to retrieve it. Alex only began to be unkind to Max when other kids did. They would look at the baroque doodles on the front of Max’s notebook and say,