So Close Read Online Free PDF

ration my visits to Walmart, because once I walked every aisle, touched every towel and sundress, that would be it.  I would have nothing else to look at.  Budget cuts had long since closed the library.  And the cable was off so I couldn’t even watch stupid TV. 
                  “Thanks, Mandy.  I’m just making a run to the bank to get change before the lunch crowd.”  She had her diner uniform on. 
                  “Okay,” I accepted her answer, which explained nothing whatsoever about what was going on.  “Did he dump you?  The ‘someone’ you’re seeing?”
                  She shook her head.  Then she pointed to the dashboard.  Where a pregnancy test seemed to be cooking, it’s cross turning a deep pink. 
                  “Fuuuck,” I said in a low long breath.  “What’re you gonna do?”  I asked stupidly, even though I’d passed three billboards telling me Jesus watches the unborn in the last mile.  There was nothing to do. 
                  “It’ll be okay” she said.
                  “God, Mom, how?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I had figured I was in for ten more years to get Billy to voting age and the hell out of here, but now I felt like I’d just found out my parole had been revoked. 
    “How are you managing Billy when I’m not here?” I asked even though I didn’t want the answer.
                  “Well you are here.”  Ever Delilah, even knocked up in a parking lot, she pulled her visor mirror down, palmed her face off and unzipped her makeup bag.  I thought of Lindsay Davis and her Hello Kitty pencil case—two very different woman armoring themselves with a little paint.  “And, despite what Little Man might’ve told you we manage just fine—if I’m working the late shift I pack his lunch and leave out his clothes the night before.  He has never missed a single day of school.”  What I didn’t snap back was the diner closed at nine—it was the bars that were open late and a coordinated outfit was the least of what he needed.  It was her one consistent thing, that the three of us looked pulled together when that metal door slammed shut on the mess behind us, no matter the amount of spit-shinning required. No matter that there was nothing to eat for breakfast before we left. “Any luck with the search?” she asked. 
                  “No.  And that douche who got me fired—well, technically—friend of douche—just called me.”
                  “What did he want?”               
    “To ‘make it up to me.’”  I snorted.
                  “Well, why don’t you go see what that means?”  She reapplied her foundation, scowling at the wrinkles she had smoked and sunned into existence.  When I was fourteen I asked Grammy how come she didn’t have brown spots or deep crevices around her mouth like her friends and she said, “Don’t smoke, wear a hat.”  I quit that day and put my sitting money toward a bottle of Banana Boat. 
                  “Are you serious?”
                  She turned to me, hands on the steering wheel like we were going somewhere.  “Mandy, a rich kid offered to do something for you—anything—is better than what we got going on right now—which is nothing.  Life will hand you very few turns on the Ferris Wheel—this might be one of yours.”
     
    We had a few more knock-downs about my calling him, but what I remember is her saying that bit about the Ferris Wheel so that must’ve been the thing that decided it.  Pax invited me to his family’s house four hours away.  On the ocean.  Where I was supposed to just give my name ‘at the booth’.  I’d never been to a house guarded by more than a pit bull before.  I was sure when the uniformed guy asked for my ID I wouldn’t be on the list, but Pax had remembered and I took that as a sign that