Me and My Baby View the Eclipse Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother who wouldn’t act right. Everybody in town had an opinion. Cheryl and Marie rubbed coconut suntan lotion on their legs and talked about it. Cheryl couldn’t decide what she thought. It seemed to her that Lisa had a point, but Netta had a point too. People must have stopped talking about her own separation by now, her separation must be old hat. This gave Cheryl a pang. She missed David. She did not miss Lisa, or Bob. With Bob in the kennel, Cheryl was getting a lot of rest.
    Then Marie said that Angela had asked her to get her some birth control pills and she had said she’d do it, but she just thought Cheryl ought to know. So Cheryl had
that
to think about too. She and Marie lay back on the sand, smelling like big sweet tropical drinks.
    Netta came out of the house then, wearing a flowered robe and a big-brimmed hat, smoking a cigarette, picking her way toward them through the sand. It took her a while to get there. For the first time it struck Cheryl how old her mother looked, and how crazy. Netta was starting to look like Mamaw, who had been dead for years and years. Netta said she was going to take Mary Duke over to the water slide, which she had been doing every day. For some reason Mary Duke had decided on this trip that she didn’t like the ocean, and she wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole. So Mary Duke was staying mostly in the house watching TV and driving everybody crazy.
    â€œI don’t see how she can be afraid of the ocean and not afraid of the water slide,” Marie said.
    â€œShe thinks there’s things in the ocean,” Cheryl said. “You know—
Jaws
.”
    Netta leaned across Cheryl and tapped Marie on the knee. “Did you hear how my own daughter Lisa did me?” she asked, and Marie said yes, she had heard it all right. Then Netta grabbed Cheryl’s knee so hard Cheryl sat up. Netta’s face beneath the huge hat brim was pale and trembly. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, honey?” she asked.
    â€œDo what, Mama?” Cheryl said.
    â€œGet rid of me like that, you know, for no reason.”
    â€œNo,” Cheryl said. “Of course not.” It was true.
    â€œGrammy, Grammy,” Mary Duke called from the house. Netta straightened up and started across the sand.
    â€œMy whole body feels different since I’ve been having this relationship with Lenny,” Marie began. “It’s hard to explain.”
    Cheryl lay flat on her back in the warm sand, smelling sweet and staring straight up at the hot white sun.
    *   *   *
    G
reat tan,”
Jerry Jarvis said. The way he said it sounded suggestive, but then when she thought about it later, Cheryl was not so sure. Maybe he didn’t mean to sound that way, maybe he was just being nice after all. Certainly it was nice of him to stop by like this after work to check out the dog pen and see how things were going. Not so well, was the truth, which she didn’t say. Bob had grown bigger and stronger at the kennel while they were away, and now he kept digging out of his pen despite the pretty ornamental gate that Jerry had sent over, despite the rocks and boards and things that Cheryl and the kids kept piling around the bottom of the fence to keep him in. The week before, Cheryl had bought a whole truckload of cinder blocks, and every time he got out, she’d put a cinder block where he did it, or a big rock she lugged up from the creek. It went on and on. Last Thursday when Bob got out, he went two streets over and stole a three-by-five Oriental rug from the Lucases, who had just moved down here from Fairfax, Virginia. Another time he knocked over Mr. Ellman’s brother, who had a pacemaker.
    Now Bob bounded against the fence, in high spirits. Cheryl sighed. She knew he could get out anytime he wanted to, until she got something along every inch of that pen. Every inch. Bob was such a hassle, but Cheryl couldn’t bring herself to