Stop That Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

homosexual. Oh, he never admitted it, but there he was, taking a new job just before the baby was due, and next thing I find out he’s shacking up with a man. And I know what kind of man this man was.”
    “What man?”
    “Then he lied to me and said he was living alone. And then he completely lost interest in you-know-what. Couldn’t admit what he was, that’s part of the problem. Was ashamed of himself.”
    “I’m hungry,” I said.
    “And I lived with it, thirty more years. Like nothing was wrong. Mending his socks, doing his laundry, even while I was in medical school, with all that work of my own.”
    “I’m
really
hungry.”
    “Come on then,” she said, and I followed her back through the dark house, past the front entryway, past a living room that looked, in my sweeping beam, the size of a gymnasium. Then down a long pitch-black hall past several empty bedrooms and bathrooms until we came to the last and largest bedroom, which now had two cots in it and a number of boxes and suitcases. “This will be our headquarters until the furniture comes,” she told me.
    “When?”
    “Next Tuesday.”
    “I’m not staying until then!”
    “We have many things to do. Time will fly.”
    “But we’re having a quiz Friday about protons and electrons!”
    “You won’t miss anything. I can teach you more in an hour than you’ll learn all week. Now help me open this box.”
    I held the light while she pried open a large shipping box. In it were hundreds of cellophane-wrapped free samples of zwieback baby biscuits, and she ran her fingers through them with pleasure, like a crazed pirate fondling her doubloons.
    “Baby biscuits?” I said.
    “They’re an excellent food.”
    I tore one open. It dissolved in my mouth like sand. “How old are these?”
    “Don’t be fussy,” she replied.
    I stood in the corner coughing out zwieback particles, while Dr. Frost bungled around her cot.
    “In the morning the Hoopengarners are coming over. They have a daughter your age, and Dr. Hoopengarner is going to be a colleague. Helped me find my new office, on State Street.”
    I was pointing my flashlight at her head.
    “This is a very important new beginning for me. They ain’t through with me yet! When Dad died a few years ago, he didn’t have much, but the little bit he left me went into this house. It’s the first thing of my own I’ve had since I was a girl.”
    “Bully for you.”
    “What?”
    “Bully. It’s what Theodore Roosevelt used to say.”
    “Would you get that thing off me?” Dr. Frost said. “I brought some candles. Why don’t you pull them out of that bag.”
    “Is there a phone here?”
    “Nope. We’re roughing it until we settle in.” She lit the candles and placed them on the windowsill, and since I was feeling cold I climbed into the sleeping bag she’d unrolled on my cot. It smelled old and mildewy, and there was a towel folded up for my head.
    “I want to go home as soon as possible,” I said. “Probably tomorrow.”
    “Ann, we’ll work out the best deal we can. You’ll never fit in with your mother’s new family; it’s treachery. The school here is excellent. I’ve already met with the sixth-grade teacher. Katerina Hoopengarner will be in your class.”
    An uncomfortable feeling rippled through me. “I fit in fine. Why are you saying that?”
    “With Weeks? That two-bit weasel?”
    “Roy’s not a two-bit weasel. He helps me with home-work and he makes good pancakes. And he’s sick of exploiting the land! He’s getting a new job.”
    “Is that so? Where?”
    “In a library,” I told her.
    In a doctorly way, which she must have practiced while visiting leper colonies in China the year before, she came over and sat on the edge of my cot. “Ann, you know I was the first person you saw when you were born. I was standing right there. You bonded to me. The way baby ducks bond, on sight. Even to a puppet the shape of a duck. Doesn’t matter. You saw
me.
I had your mother when