The Adults Read Online Free PDF

the rutabaga dip and Mr. Hemley thought this was absolutely an inappropriate thing to do.
    “I guess my father thinks your mother is very herniated,” I whispered.
    “Shut up,” he said, quietly and in my ear. “Don’t make stupid jokes. Don’t make your voice all high-pitched like that, all curious and interested and stupid and shit.”
    “Don’t tell me to shut up,” I said.
    “Your father’s a shithead.”
    “Your mother’s so old!”
    Mrs. Resnick was thirty-nine, two years older than my mother.
    “Your father’s a fuck face .”
    “Shut up.”
    He came closer. For a second, I still thought he might kiss me.
    “A giant bloody cunt,” he whispered in my ear.
    The word felt wrong coming out of his mouth, uncomfortable, like a new pair of jeans still stiff around your body. He was staring at me like he could kill me, while I felt certain that I loved him, that I would have sat back down on the log and pretended nothing had happened if he would; even in that moment when his cruelty was desperate and barbaric, clinging to my face, I would have asked him to reach out for me. But I stood there, so deeply openmouthed, a bird could have flown in.
    “Do you know what he does for a living?” Mark asked.
    “Of course I know what he does for a living,” I said. “He’s my father .”
    Though I didn’t actually know what my father did for a living because every time I asked, he said, “I’m an investment banker,” and I’d say, “What’s that?” and he’d sit me down all serious, as though I was on the brink of learning something incomprehensible. With a hand on his knee, he’d say, “Well . . .”
    I’d beg him to stop. “No more! No more! I can’t take any more!” I’d shout, and we’d laugh.
    “He fucking steals money from companies,” Mark said. It felt typical for some reason that Mark would know my father better than I did. Sometimes I got the distinct feeling that everybody knew my father better than I did, even our mailman, whom he chatted with at the end of our driveway. “And everybody hates him. My father hates him. He said that nobody at the golf course liked to play with him because he tried to make bets with money that nobody had.”
    “My father is a good golfer,” was all I thought to say.
    “Your father is a bastard. I should kill him.”
    “You can’t kill him,” I said. “He’s my father .”
    “Fathers get killed all the time,” he said.
    I could almost feel my mother looking around on the deck with an empty drink, sucking on the green olive, grimacing with bitterness but only because she had nothing else to do. My father was not dancing with her, not dipping her until the bobby pins fell from her bun and between the cracks of the Brazilian wood.
    “I’m out of here,” Mark said.
    “Oh my God,” Richard said, pointing at my father. Richard had followed us in the woods and stood between two oaks gaping at us. My father and Mrs. Resnick were still oblivious, huddled together, two bodies sharing a mouth. Mark pushed by Richard and left.
    “Your dad’s in serious trouble,” Richard said to me, seeming somewhat pleased about this.
    “Fuck you, Trenton,” I said, and ran after Mark. “I’m going to vomit,” I said to Mark when I caught up, the Polaroid developing in my hand.
    “Don’t be such a child,” he said. “Vomiting would change nothing.”
    When we got to my side yard, my lawn became his. I stopped and watched him go. He opened his front door and walked inside. He did not even say good night. He did not even turn around. I stood like this, in between our lawns, until I had to sit, until I started running my hands up and down my legs. Everything was moving too fast. The hair on my legs had grown back into stubble. The cut on my knee had crusted into a scab. It was already brown. I was already picking at it with a nail and the blood was already at my shoe. Dr. Trenton was already sober. Mrs. Bulwark’s eyes were already clumped in mascara like