The Art of Mending Read Online Free PDF

sisters.”
    “I can assure you I stayed out of the God area.”
    “Yeah, but when Stella was only four, you told her you turned into a werewolf at night.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “She told me. And she also told me that you lined shoes up along the top of your door and then yelled for Danny to come quick, and when he pushed the door open all the shoes fell on him. And gave him a black eye.”
    Silence.
    “You robbed Tina’s piggy bank twice.”
    “All right. Good night.”
    “Oh. Oh! And you—”
    He leaned over, kissed me. “Good
night.
We have an early morning.” He turned on his side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. It’s amazing. Head on pillow, and he’s out.
    I lay awake, wondering what was up with Caroline. I thought of the drive ahead of us, how the kids would ignore each other for the most part but how there would also be a few fights to contend with. It was only a five-hour drive, though, and then we’d be there. The garden would be perfectly tended, the bird feeders would all be full. There would probably be sheets and upside-down shirts and pants on the clothesline; my mother was a big believer in line drying. One summer I’d tried it myself, but the romance had drowned in the inconvenience.
    The food would not be memorable, of course, but the setting would be nice. We’d eat out on the back porch on a green painted table with an embroidered tablecloth, nice old flowered china, a huge vase of flowers, and the cut-glass salt-and-pepper shakers that had belonged to my grandparents—whenever I saw them, I remembered those shakers being on their Formica kitchen table. I remembered, too, my grandfather using his tongue to pop his lower dentures out of his mouth, then gulping them back in, one of the many things he did to thrill us grandchildren. For a long time, I hadn’t known they were dentures, and I’d thought my grandfather was an extremely talented man. I had spent long periods of time lying on my bed trying to loosen my own bottom teeth so I too could perform this interesting feat. My mother had come into my room one day with a laundry basket and had seen me yanking away at my back molars. “What are you doing?” she’d asked. And when I’d told her I was trying to do Grandpa’s trick, she’d laughed and told me his teeth were false.
    “But where are his real teeth?” I’d asked.
    “Gone.”
    “But gone where?”
    “I don’t know,” she’d said. “Just gone.”
    “But—”
    “Laura.” She’d touched my shoulder. “Don’t ask so many questions. You always ask so many questions. Don’t do that. Just . . . accept things.” She’d moved to my dresser to put away neatly folded stacks of underpants, talking with her back to me. “Don’t ask questions and don’t look back. Believe me, you’ll be much more content.”
    I’d grown silent, trying to figure out what
that
meant. Then I’d gone back to thoughts of my grandfather’s teeth.
    It was strange how my memory was changing. More and more, someone would refer to something that had happened fairly recently, and I would have forgotten all about it. I misplaced my glasses, the cinnamon, the name of an actor I’d always known. An abiding comfort was that it was happening to Pete too. “Guess who was in the store today?” he’d say. And then he’d get this panicked look on his face. “It was . . . oh, you know. You know who I mean.” We would stand in the kitchen, blankly staring at each other. “Oh, man,” he’d say. “Hold on a minute.” He’d concentrate for a while, eyebrows knit together, arms crossed, one foot tapping the floor, and then he’d throw his hands up in the air and give up. Hours later, he’d remember. Or not.
    Other things, especially from times long ago, I remembered clearly. I recall, for example, every detail about a time I lay on my belly next to the stream that used to be half a block away from our house. It was a hot morning in July; I had just turned ten, and I’d wanted