Friendswood Read Online Free PDF

between Lee and her mother must have been catastrophic. Some insult or betrayal the other one couldn’t forgive. Her mother started talking about meeting Jana’s new third-grade teacher, how they’d all had an unforeseen vacation because of the storm and now it was about time they got back to school. Willa stopped listening and looked out the window at a bee banging itself against the glass, its tiny furred face.

LEE

    S HE’D KNOWN SOMETHING WAS WRONG with Banes Field, that spring, 1996, though she couldn’t place it. The light hung at strange angles on the round white tank. The windows of the warehouse had been painted black, and she saw a boy wearing a red baseball hat walk in and out of it several different times—he always carried a wide, purple cylinder thing over his shoulder. It looked like a giant, shiny thermos. And there was a fat, brown-skinned man too—who wore a hard hat and overalls and smoked cigars while he walked. He walked around the field at odd hours, or sometimes cut the weeds in a riding lawn mower. Even the weeds had begun to look odd—they were sparser but also more varied in color and type than she remembered. At night, she heard a strange piercing whistle, and in the morning, there was a bitter stink in the air. Jack would stare out the back window in the kitchen and say, shaking his head, “I wonder what Ms. Banes is going to do with all that.” They worried that she might sell it to a developer, and they’d end up with a parking lot or a shopping center right in their backyard.
    One morning Lee had settled down with her coffee in the sitting room after Jack had left for work and Jess had left for school. She was rattled, maybe because of Jess’s struggle with algebra last night, the way she’d moaned over her homework, all those less-than and greater-than marks, like open mouths, the opaque spells of the equations. Lee had given her a glass of soda and worked through the figures with her as best she could,and she hoped Jess would do okay on the test that day. And she’d comforted Jack at breakfast with pancakes because he had to fire someone at work, and he said, “There’s no kind way to do it. There just isn’t.” She turned the pages of the newspaper, the black print running all over the columns. Watery light came down from the high window, the picture on the wall of the owl: alert, looking for something to eat in the watercolor green, looking not to be eaten, the painted tree branch fading out at the edge of the paper. But Jess had earned
A
s in all her other subjects, and Jack would find a way to not be cruel—he always did. In the news were warnings about computer hackers, warnings about fighting in the Middle East. She read an editorial about why kids should say the Pledge of Allegiance in school, why the flag should stand in all the churches, and she felt the chirpiness and aggression of the man’s words right there in the room. She stopped reading, stopped drinking coffee, and studied the shadows on the wall. She wanted to be grateful. After all she’d been through as a kid—her mom’s drunken fits and their sporadic, shameful poverty—she had this nice house, a husband who sang to her, who brought home trinkets he thought she’d like and didn’t nag her. She had a daughter with sweet, curious eyes who liked to tell jokes and tried so hard to be good. And Jess was good, even as a teenager, despite the hollering over the math. Leaves rustled against the window, and gradually, Lee’s nerves had calmed. The room returned to her in its solidity and quaintness, the pale couch, the gold-stemmed lamp, the paisley curtains.
    In the afternoon after Jess came home from school, Lee had gone out to check the garden, which was at the edge of Banes Field. The parsley bush was a lush and large bucket, and the azaleas, pink and silly like wadded tutus. Out in the field, there were bare patches of