Ordinary Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page A

I have to go over to his four-wheeler instead. It’s an old battered Honda, the only vehicle he has, and it’s covered with snow. I quickly brush it off and climb on, sitting as far back on the seat as I can.
    He climbs on in front of me, clumsy and slow. Turns the key and the motor chugs but doesn’t start. He curses and tries it again and again while I sit behind him shivering, trying not to breathe him in, trying not to move a muscle while he gets angrier and angrier, trying not to freak when Dozer sticks his nose into the hole in the trailer skirt and barks like thunder.
    “Sic ’em!” Harlow snaps, and then to me, “If I see that cat, I’m shooting it.”
    Misty.
    And then the engine vrooms to life and he shifts gears and the bald tires spin and we’re creeping through the littered yard to the mailbox where he pauses, snags his government check, then moves onto the road where he guns it and I have to grab on to his waist or be thrown off backward. The frigid wind is searing, my eyes are tearing, and every couple of minutes I have to duck my head and hide behind his massive shoulders just to clear my vision.
    I have moved heaven and earth to be with my mother. I have. I’ve stuck by her through hell, tried to help, to be near her, make her smile, save her, tried to keep up when she walked away, to be good enough and not cause trouble, trying trying trying, but it was useless, she’s impossible to reach, and you can’t get close to someone who doesn’t even like you, who doesn’t want to hear what you think or know how you feel, who at best tolerates you because you’re useful and at worst betrays you in a way you can still hardly bear to think about.
    How can you make someone love you when they won’t?
    How long are you supposed to keep trying?
    We roar down the road with Dozer barking and limping frantically along behind us, jouncing over ruts, fishtailing over slick, snow-covered ice. Harlow laughs and spins the quad, almost sending us over the bank and down into the dark ravine. My stomach lurches, queasy. My hands are numb and my head is pounding.
    He slows to make a turn and I peer straight up the mountain to where Sunrise Road is, the high road, the road where Beale lives, the road I haven’t been up on once since we left when I was eleven.
    Doesn’t that make me a real daughter, Candy? Following my mother’s unspoken orders, never asking questions, knowing, without her even saying, that they will never be answered, finding out the hard way that she will never, ever talk about what happened? That I live knowing it doesn’t matter to her if the open wound inside me never heals, that we left Beale without saying good-bye but with a bag stuffed with things that didn’t belong to us, things my mother decided were our due and I didn’t even know we had until we landed back at Candy’s, and she and my mother went through it all to see what they could pawn. The first to go was Aunt Loretta’s beautiful amethyst promise ring, which bought them two cartons of cigarettes, a case of vodka, three dozen painkillers, and a bag of Doritos.
    The only thing my mother took from our time with Beale that was actually hers was the ruby velvet blazer, and scared that it, too, would be hocked, I stole it out of her bag one night when she was out.
    She never mentioned its disappearance, so I have no idea if she ever even missed it.
    I haven’t talked to Beale in six long years, so I still don’t know why he never had us arrested. Maybe he was too deep in mourning to even care. Or maybe by that point he was just glad to see us go, whatever the price.
    That thought still hurts, and is why even if I did have the chance to ask him, I wouldn’t. How could I ever face him again, knowing how badly we’d betrayed him, how we had robbed him of so much, and left him to suffer the aftermath?
    How could I face him, knowing my mother had threatened him with the unthinkable?
    No, my life hasn’t always been this way.
    We