Love and Other Four-Letter Words Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mom was slumped on a stool, her face buried in her hands. Shards of broken pottery were strewn across the tiled floor. I kicked myself for not using the front entrance and heading directly up to my room.
    Mom wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Dad and I bought this the summer we moved to Ithaca,” she moaned.
    Glancing at the debris, I recognized the remains of the midnight-blue bowl that we always filled with peaches in the summer and apples in the fall.
    “I was wrapping it up when I heard Moxie barking in the yard… and I remembered I'd left her off her leash. …”
    As Mom choked up again, I bounded up the stairs, two at a time. Once in my room, I dug my dictionary out of a city-bound crate and sat on my bed, thumbing through the S's.
    Sustain: to support, hold … bear the weight of.
    I sighed and flopped onto my back. As the dictionary slid off my legs in a waterfall of pages, I wondered if that was my eternal fate: to “support, hold and bear the weight of.” And when it comes down to it, is there anyone out there who would do that for me?

 
    B y the time the sun was directly overhead, I'd lugged my suitcases into the trunk of the Volvo and my crates onto the front porch for the movers to pick up. And I was halfway up the stairs with a broom when I remembered that the cleaning service was coming this afternoon. So when the Mayflower truck turned into the driveway, I was playing my guitar under the red maple in the backyard, doing my best imitation of a relaxed person.
    But a few minutes later, the side door slammed and this guy stomped toward me. He was short, with wide shoulders and huge biceps. He reminded me of an inflatable punching bag.
    “You live here?”
    “Yeah …”
    “We're going to need your help inside. That lady is driving my buddy crazy, handing him half-packed boxes and then taking them back to rewrap vases. At this rate, there's no way we're going to be on the road by one.”
    As he started back across the lawn, I stood up, brushing the grass off the back of my thighs. I could feel my cheeks tensing as I thought:
The Unmade Bed strikes again.
    An unmade bed. That's what Grandma Davis once called Mom. Not to her face, but while we were waiting in the driveway of my grandparents' San Jose ranch house, where Dad grew up. We'd risen early, to beat rush hour traffic to San Francisco, where we were meeting Aunt Jayne at Fisherman's Wharf. But we ended up leaving forty-five minutes late because Mom took forever to get ready, misplacing her sunglasses twice in the process.
    Go easy on her, Beryl,
Dad had said, calling Grandma Davis by her first name. As he shot a glance in my direction, I'd leaned down and double-knotted my sneakers, even though the laces rarely came undone.
    Grandma Davis has never been crazy about Mom, and she doesn't work very hard to disguise it. Maybe it's because Grandma Davis is so rigid that you can set aclock by her. Maybe it has something to do with that theory about mothers never thinking any woman is good enough for their perfect sons. Or maybe it's because she wasn't invited to my parents' wedding, even though the only attendants were the justice of peace and a couple of witnesses, friends of Mom's from art school.
    Before Mom was an art teacher, she used to dream of becoming a famous painter. But shortly after she'd moved into Dad's apartment near Columbia University, they'd discovered he was allergic to the fumes from her oil paints, so she'd tucked them away until they could afford studio space. When I was two, we headed up to Cornell, where Dad had been offered a teaching position. And somehow Mom's art took a backseat.
    Not completely, like she had an easel set up in the garage, where Dad paid an electrician to install track lighting in one corner. Sometimes Mom would get so immersed in a canvas that she wouldn't emerge all weekend, except to sprint into the bathroom or grab a slice of the pizza Dad and I had ordered. When I was younger, I used to carry