In a Perfect World Read Online Free PDF

curtains fluttered in the windows, and Mark’s uniforms shifted in his closet.
    Jiselle looked over at Sam. His eyes were wide but also amused. He said, “Keep reading?”
    Jiselle inhaled. She swallowed. Deep in the back of her closet, her stepdaughter’s black dress—the one that covered, maybe, three inches of her thighs at most, the one with the rip in the spandex lace just over her right breast—lay on the floor like a call girl’s shadow—along with the spiked black leather dog collar Sara liked to wear with the dress. Her fishnet stockings were there, as well, and those black combat boots that, it seemed, Sara had not yet noticed were also missing. Jiselle turned the page.
    It was, indeed, delightful to walk about in the country. In a sunny spot stood a pleasant old farmhouse close by a deep river. And from the house down to the waterside grew great burdock leaves, so high that under the tallest of them a little girl could stand upright.
     
    Jiselle had begun reading the book to Sam a few weeks earlier, when one night before dinner, she found him under his bed.
    “What are you doing under there?”
    There was no answer.
    What could she do? Mark had been gone four out of every five days since the beginning of the month. If she didn’t get Sam out from under the bed herself, he might stay under there until Mark came home again. A child’s skeleton in jeans and a T-shirt. Strawberry-blond curls and dust. “Sam?”
    He didn’t answer, so she sat down on the bed.
    “Sam?”
    Jiselle heard him sniffle under there and felt her own implication of tears then, just behind the bridge of her nose, somewhere around her sinuses. She bit her lip to stop the tears. It would do Sam no good if she started crying, too—although, she supposed, the girls would love it. (“Are you blubbering again?” Sara would ask. “Gee,” Camilla would say, as if simply stating an interesting fact, “our mother never cried. Our mother always said, ‘Be strong, girls. Nobody likes a crybaby.’”) Jiselle pinched the place between her eyebrows and lay on her back on Sam’s bed, her feet still on the floor. She swallowed, and then counted to ten before saying it again.
    “Sam?”
    A muffled sob.
    “Please?” she said to the ceiling. “Come out?” And then, trying to control the little quiver in her own voice, the anxiety that she imagined would sound to him like impatience, she said, “Sam? I can’t let you just stay under the bed. Can I?”
    Even to her, it sounded weak, the question childlike, as if she really were expecting an answer to that question from the ten-year-old under the bed.
    Sam went completely silent again. Not even a sniffle. Jiselle knelt down beside the bed and tried to look under it, but all she could see was darkness and the white rubber sole of one shoe.
    “Okay, Sam,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong. Can you please tell me?” She waited.
    This time she counted to fifty.
    Finally, she reached under the bed, fishing around until she’d gotten a grip on what she was fairly sure was a tennis shoe, and then a second one, and pulled Sam out by his feet as gently as she could.
    He didn’t struggle. He emerged with a long strand of dust attached to his head, and his face a mess of tears and snot, wrinkled and blotched from crying.
    “What’s wrong?” Jiselle asked, leading him to the edge of the bed by his wrist and sitting him down beside her.
    “I miss my dad,” Sam sobbed.
    “Oh, Sam,” she said, and she couldn’t help it then. A few tears ran from the corners of her eyes into the little valley between her lips and her nose. She wiped them away and said, “I’m so sorry. I miss him, too.”
     
     
    So, they decided together that they needed to keep themselves busier. They wouldn’t miss Mark so much if they had 37 more to do. Especially in the evenings, after dinner, and just before bed. Jiselle would, they decided, read aloud to Sam in the evenings. He agreed that the Hans Christian