The Descendants Read Online Free PDF Page A

talking. Esther pushes her plate toward the chairs. I push my plate forward as well, and Scottie sits down on a stool, looking at both of us and then at the food in front of her.
    Scottie cuts into the enchilada. With her other hand, she types, or texts, a message to one of her friends.
    Esther looks at me and smiles. “She like lard.”

 
     
    4

     
     
    JUST WHEN I’M about to go to my room and get to work, Esther tells me that Mrs. Higgins has called and wants me to return her call immediately. She wipes the stove and uses her fingernail to remove something stubborn, grunting. I swear she does this purposefully to make me feel sorry for her.
    “Who’s Mrs. Higgins?”
    “Lani’s mother.”
    “Who’s Lani?” I ask.
    “Scottie’s friend, maybe. Call her.” She takes a long sip of her water and exhales loudly.
    “Could you call her? You know I have that work to do.”
    “I already talked to her. She wanted to talk to Mrs. King.”
    “What did you say?”
    “I say Mrs. King’s sick. And then she asked to talk to you.”
    “Great,” I say. She’ll want me to help with a bake sale or a carpool, or I’ll have to volunteer at a dance. That’s the thing with a crisis. My wife is in a coma, but this doesn’t prevent life from happening. There’s still Scottie’s school that I have to deal with, hours I need to bill, this trust that needs to be tended to.
    Esther leaves the kitchen with a bucketful of cleaning products, and I use the kitchen phone to call Mrs. Higgins. All the dishes from lunch are out of sight. The big black pot is upside down on the drying rack. The floor is shiny and slippery. I can see my face in the countertops.
    A woman answers the phone, practically singing hello. I like when people answer a phone this way. Or when women answer a phone this way. “Hello there, is this Mrs. Higgins?”
    “Yes?” she says.
    Telemarketers must love her. “Hi, this is Matt King returning your call. Scottie’s father. Actually, I don’t even know if your daughter is a classmate of my daughter’s, I just assumed—”
    “Yes, Lani is a classmate of Scottie’s,” she says. The sweet cadence of her voice is gone.
    “Sorry, my wife’s not feeling well and can’t return your call, but how can I help you?”
    “Well,” she says, “let’s see. Where should I start?”
    I assume this is a rhetorical question, but she seems to be waiting for me to tell her where to start. “I guess you should start at the beginning,” I say.
    “Okay,” she says. “Here’s the beginning. Your daughter seems to be text-messaging my daughter some pretty darn awful things, and I’d like her to stop.”
    “Oh,” I say. “What things?”
    “She calls her Lani Piggins and Lani Moo.”
    Lani Moo is the cartoon cow for a local dairy company. “Huh,” I say. “I’m sorry about that. Kids call each other names sometimes, I guess. It’s a form of affection.” I look at my watch. I think of Joanie buying it for me.
    “She writes Nice shirt to my daughter. Or Nice pants. ”
    “That’s nice,” I say.
    “It’s cyber sarcasm!” she yells, and I pull the phone away from my ear not because the yell is high-pitched but because it’s low and gravelly and mother-wolf-like.
    “But maybe it’s not, uh, cyber sarcasm, and it’s sincere flattery.”
    “She writes CS after. That stands for ‘cyber sarcasm.’ She also calls my daughter Lanikai, inferring that she’s the size of an entire neighborhood.”
    I don’t say anything. I even sort of smile, because it’s clever.
    “Also,” she continues, “your daughter said that she’s afraid to be her partner at the rock wall because Scottie doesn’t want to fall into my daughter’s butt crack. That doesn’t even make sense.”
    I’m about to say that Scottie may be implying that Lani’s butt crack is bigger than most, like a crevasse, because of the blown-up scale of the rest of her body. It’s a logical continuation of the fat joke, but I refrain.