House of Dance Read Online Free PDF Page A

just staring.
    So I stared where she was staring, toward a perfectly ordinary house: brown brick, black shutters, concrete square of a stoop, no real doodads I could see, nothing for our Seeing list. Then I looked through the afternoon glare past the window into the ordinaryliving room, and that’s when I saw what Leisha had seen: my own mother and Mr. Paul, taking a break from window washing. My mom in her overalls and Mr. Paul in his, mashing his fat lips to hers. My mom still had one of her tangerine-colored gloves on. She had herself so up against him that there was no air between them.
    “I thought,” Leisha said, “that Mr. Paul was—”
    “Yeah,” I said, “he is.”
    “I thought your mom was—”
    “Don’t ask me about my mother,” I said. “I don’t have the first idea.”
    “I thought—”
    “Forget it, Leisha. Forget it, okay?” I started walking fast, but Leisha just stayed put, staring and staring. I went back and yanked at her skinny arm until she started moving. “We’re a whole honking lot of out of here,” I said. “Got it?”
    “But—” she said.
    “And you didn’t see that, right?”
    “Whatever. Sure.”
    “No buts,” I said, “and no whatevers.” And don’t even ask me what I never wrote down on that list that cataloged our shared human condition.

EIGHT
    S OMETHING YOU CAN RELY ON is Pastrami’s water ice. Cherry and lemon and Welch’s colored grape, for a dollar fifty, sold middle of May straight through September. They scoop it like ice cream into a paper cone, and they give you a spoon and three totally recycled napkins, and if you need to change the flavor of your day, you order yourself up one. It was getting past five in the afternoon. I’d been at Granddad’s forever. Mom had put ten dollars on the kitchen counter before she’d left for work in the somuch earlier morning, saying, “Don’t count on me for dinner.” That’s it. Period. Not even an “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t worry,” I didn’t say back.
    Granddad had been getting tired. He had told me several different versions of how I should be on my way, but I had nothing and nobody to go home to and nothing to lose by savoring every single spoonful of Pastrami’s grape ice. Mr. D’Imperio himself had scooped out my cone, giving me extra for free, telling me how you had to feed the corporation, which was his fancy way of designating the stomach. “How’s your grandfather?” he’d asked me, and I’d simply said, “Fine,” and he’d said, “You tell him Mr. D. says hi,” and I’d said that I would, tomorrow.
    “You won’t forget now, will you, Rosie?”
    “I forget nothing,” I said, which was hardly a lie.
    “A chip off the old block,” said Mr. D.
    “Which block?” I wanted to know.
    “Grandfather’s block on your mother’s side,” Mr. D. answered. He was holding his stomach as he sometimes did, as if it needed the bracing of his hands to keep it high. “We go back,” he said, “a very long time.”
    I nodded.
    “I never knew your grandfather to forget a thing,” he said.
    “Doesn’t throw much away either,” I said. I felt my face go hot, despite the ice, but Mr. D. was not offended; he just laughed his big it-all-begins-at-the-stomach laugh.
    “You’re all spice, Rosie,” he told me.
    I nodded again, as if I were sure that spice was the best possible thing you could be. “Good batch of grape ice,” I said, backing up toward the door.
    “We have it all summer long at Pastrami’s.”
    By now I was out in the late sun, standing with my back against the redbrick wall that divided Pastrami’s from Whiz Bang. The road was rush-houred over with cars and trucks.Peak-hour trains came and went. Sidewalks on either side were overwhelmed with walkers. I was nothing to anyone passing by, as see-through as an early shadow, and I was thinking of Leisha at the shore, and I was thinking about Nick working the innards of cars, and I was thinking about Rocco on his ten-step