Tenth of December Read Online Free PDF

do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again.
    Why that laugh/snort meant so much to her she had nofreaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha.
    Outside, Bo hopped to his feet, suddenly curious, because (here we go) the lady who’d called had just pulled up?
    Yep, and in a nice car, too, which meant too bad she’d put “Cheap” in the ad.
    Abbie squealed, “I love it, Mommy, I want it!” as the puppy looked up dimly from its shoebox and the lady of the house went trudging away and one-two-three-four plucked up four dog turds from the rug.
    Well, wow, what a super field trip for the kids, Marie thought, ha ha (the filth, the mildew smell, the dry aquarium holding the single encyclopedia volume, the pasta pot on the bookshelf with an inflatable candy cane inexplicably sticking out of it), and although some might have been disgusted (by the spare tire on the dining-room table , by the way the glum mother dog, the presumed in-house pooper, was now dragging her rear over the pile of clothing in the corner, in a sitting position, splay-legged, moronic look of pleasure on her face), Marie realized (resisting the urge to rush to the sink and wash her hands, in part because the sink had a basketball in it) that what this really was, was deeply sad.
    Please do not touch anything, please do not touch , she said to Josh and Abbie, but just in her head, wanting to give the children a chance to observe her being democratic and accepting, and afterward they could all wash up at thehalf-remodeled McDonald’s, as long as they just please please kept their hands out of their mouths, and God forbid they should rub their eyes.
    The phone rang, and the lady of the house plodded into the kitchen, placing the daintily held, paper-towel-wrapped turds on the counter .
    “Mommy, I want it,” Abbie said.
    “I will definitely walk him like twice a day,” Josh said.
    “Don’t say ‘like,’ ” Marie said.
    “I will definitely walk him twice a day,” Josh said.
    Okay, then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain’t hep it . But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable …
    Ha ha, wow, the mind was amazing, always cranking out these—
    Marie stepped to the window and, anthropologically pulling the blind aside, was shocked, so shocked that she dropped the blind and shook her head, as if trying to wake herself, shocked to see a young boy, just a few years younger than Josh, harnessed and chained to a tree, via some sort of doohickey by which—she pulled the blind back again, sure she could not have seen what she thought she had—
    When the boy ran, the chain spooled out. He was running now, looking back at her, showing off. When he reached the end of the chain, it jerked and he dropped as if shot.
    He rose to a sitting position, railed against the chain, whipped it back and forth, crawled to a bowl of water, and, lifting it to his lips, took a drink: a drink from a dog’s bowl .
    Josh joined her at the window.
    She let him look.
    He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
    She remembered coming out of the closet to find her mother’s scattered lingerie and the ditchdigger’s metal hanger full of orange flags. She remembered waiting outside the junior high in the bitter cold, the snow falling harder, as she counted over and over to two hundred, promising herself each time that when she reached two hundred she would begin the long walk back—
    God, she would have killed for just one righteous adult to confront her mother, shake her,