Falling in Place Read Online Free PDF

the blame on the shepherd, and the next weekend John had taken the unfairly maligned poodle with him to Rye.
    He went to stay with his mother, at first, because she had said she was dying. What she said was cancer was only anemia, though, and now she took pills and cooked in an iron pot, and her anemia was just fine. When he first went to his mother’s, Louise was sick with the flu, so he took the baby—partly to relieve Louise, partly to cheer up his mother. When they were both better, Brandt stayed. It was argued about for a year, and then they stopped arguing. For the last two years, they hadn’t talked much. The shepherd had been hit by a car.
    Mary thought that Lost in the Forest might like to hear how her father came home on Friday evening and left on Sunday night, and about how the housebroken poodle was with her grandmother and her younger brother—all of them together in Rye with the Marx Brothers running amok on the tube. The situation was embarrassing, and Mary wouldn’t have minded embarrassing Lost in the Forest.
    She wondered with what emotion Lost in the Forest would read the essay: the way she read “The Pardoner’s Tale,” smiling at every word, or the way she sounded self-righteous, reading “All happy families are alike… ” That was pretty good. Mary remembered that one. The rest of the book probably fell off, but that was a zinger.
    “Daddy,” John Joel said, “make him stop.”
    “Stop,” John said tonelessly. Probably John Joel didn’t even hear that his father had responded. Mary heard him, because she was walking close behind him.
    “Stop it!” Louise said, whirling so suddenly on Brandt, who was pulling his brother’s arm, that both John Joel and Brandt stopped walking. “Walk with me,” she said to Brandt.
    Brandt turned and ran into the road.
    John put down his bag and ran after him. He caught him before he made it around the curve. Mary braced herself for Brandt’s scream, but John just hoisted him on his shoulders, and Brandt laughed, either because he was relieved, or just because he was enjoying the ride. No doubt about who was the favorite child in the family.
    “I’m not carrying this thing another mile to humor you,” Louise said to John, when he and Brandt came up beside her. “If you don’t want to have the picnic at the next bench, I’m going back to the car.”
    A car passed them and turned into the next picnic area.
    “Not my fault,” John shrugged.
    “Not that you’re not happy they’re there,” Louise said.
    The car bumped over pebbles and onto the grass. As they passed by, music was already playing loudly and two boys were throwing cans of beer to two girls who had gotten out of the car. They were trying to go into the woods, but the beer cans kept sailing at them.
    “They’re going to explode!” one of the girls hollered. “Stop it.”
    The beer cans kept flying. Once Mary had seen a comedy routine on television when the comic had thrown balls offstage, throwing carefully into somebody’s hand, no sound because there were no misses, and then as he was about to toss another ball, all the balls came flying back, knocking him over. She couldn’t remember how it ended.
    “Cut it out!” the girl screamed again. The other girl had run into the woods.
    Beer cans kept flying at the girl. She was dodging them, after she had caught one can in each hand. She was trying to keep away from them, backing into the woods, backing up because she didn’t want to get hit in the back.
    “Lovely little bit of Americana,” John said to Louise when they passed the boys.
    John had put Brandt down, and he scurried away, looking left and right, doing his flat-footed Groucho shuffle.
    “Your mother’s turning him into a great intellectual,” Louise said.
    “He’s five years old.”
    “I remember how old he is. Little as I see him, and small as my brain is, I
am
able to store
some
facts away.”
    “Go ahead and be a bitch,” he said.
    “Thank you for