Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

favor.”
    “Well.” Mavis frowned. She wanted to get it right this time. “He didn’t want the Spam. I mean the kids like it but he don’t so. In this heat you can’t keep much meat. I had a whole chuck steak go green on me once so I went and took the car, just some weenies, and I thought, well, Merle and Pearl. I was against it at first but he said—”
    “M-e-r-l-e?”
    “Yes, m’am.”
    “Go on.”
    “They wasn’t crying or nothing but he said his head hurt. I understood. I did. You can’t expect a man to come home from that kind of work and have to watch over babies while I go get something decent to put in front of him. I know that ain’t right.”
    “So you took the twins. Why didn’t you take the other children along?”
    “It’s a weasel out back,” said Frankie.
    “Groundhog,” said Billy James.
    “Shut!” Sal leaned over Mavis’ stomach and pointed at her brothers.
    June smiled. “Wouldn’t it have been safer,” she continued, “with the other children in the car? I mean, they’re older.”
    Mavis slid her thumb under her bra strap, pulling it back over her shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting no danger. Higgledy Piggledy is just yonder. I could of went to the Convenience but their stuff sits too long for me.”
    “So you left the newborns in the car and went in to buy some chuck steak—”
    “No, m’am. Weenies.”
    “Right. Wieners.” June was writing quickly but didn’t seem to be crossing out anything. “But what I want to ask is, why did it take so long? To buy one item.”
    “It didn’t. Take long. I couldn’t of been in there more than five minutes, tops.”
    “Your babies suffocated, Mrs. Albright. In a hot car with the windows closed. No air. It’s hard to see that happening in five minutes.”
    It could be sweat, but it hurt enough to be blood. She didn’t dare swat Sal’s hand away or acknowledge the pain even slightly. Instead she scratched the corner of her mouth and said, “I’ve punished myself over that, but that’s pretty near the most it could of been. I walked in there straight to the dairy section and picked up two packs of Armours which is high you know but I didn’t even look for the price. Some of them is cheaper but just as good. But I was hurrying so I didn’t look.”
    “You were hurrying?”
    “Oh, yes, m’am. He was fit to be tied. Spam ain’t nothing for a working man to eat.”
    “And wieners are?”
    “I thought about chops. I thought about chops.”
    “Didn’t you know your husband was coming home for supper, Mrs. Albright? Doesn’t he come home for supper every day?”
    She’s a really nice person, Mavis thought. Polite. She didn’t look around the room or at the boys’ feet, or jump at the crashing noise from the rear of the house, followed by a toilet flush.
    The sound of the photographer snapping his cases was loud when the toilet stopped. “Got it,” he said. “Real nice meeting you, m’am.” He leaned in to shake Mavis’ hand. His hair was the same color as the reporter’s.
    “Get enough of the Cadillac?” asked June.
    “Plenty.” He made an O with thumb and forefinger. “You all be nice, hear?” He touched his hat and was gone.
    Sal left off squeezing her mother’s waist. She leaned forward and concentrated on swinging her foot, only occasionally hitting Mavis’ shin.
    From where they sat no one in the room could see the Cadillac parked in front of the house. But it had been seen for months by everybody in the neighborhood and could now be seen by anybody in Maryland since the photographer had taken more shots of it than he had of them. Mint green. Lettuce green. Cool. But the color wouldn’t show in the newspaper. What would show would be the size, the flashiness of the place where babies had died. Babies forever unseen now because the mother did not even have a snapshot of their trusting faces.
    Sal jumped up and screamed, “Ow! Look! A beetle!” and stomped on her mother’s foot.
    Mavis had said,