The Fence My Father Built Read Online Free PDF

never got around to using any of them. She just took them in and out of the china closet, washing them when they got dusty.
    My aunt must have seen me peeking at the marking on the bottom of the cups. “This is a special occasion,” she said and smiled. A copper-clad teakettle rattled on the burner. The range, which looked to be from the same era as the oven doors outside, was pink with gray trim, like the rest of the kitchen. It was actually more of a kitchenette, the only nook of the place that wasn’t cluttered with knickknacks, piles of magazines, and grocery sacks brimming with aluminum cans.
    In fact, it was difficult to tell precisely where the kitchen ended and the living room began, except for a small throw rug, which looked to be woven from women's nylons. I’d always had a problem with claustrophobia and already sensed my chest tightening. It didn’t help that the walls were framed in more of the same dark paneling I’d seen outside, or that sacks of empty soda cans were piled everywhere, like a bunch of cats taking over the furniture.
    Chaz would have had a field day with the two paintings that hung slightly askew on the wall. One was a small oil painting of pansies that could have been a paint-by-number. The other was a reproduction of Jesus whose eyes followed me across the room. He watched us from atop the Aztec gold sofa. It was threadbare with a Mexican serape draped across the back.
    “Can I help with something?” I asked. Mom taught me a great woman does everything with poise and grace, even when she’d rather not. She only said things like this in her more lucid moments, when she wasn’t polishing silverware for the fourth time in a week or re-waxing the floors.
    Lutie laughed, and I marveled at how relaxed I felt. “Just like your daddy,” she said, “forever lending a hand. And you look like him: same black-as-chimney-soot head of hair and lots of it. I’ll bet you got the fire of the Holy Ghost the way he did.”
    I sat at the dinette and started folding napkins in neat triangles. The only ghosts I saw came in my nightmares.
    She counted out five cups for the saucers and set them on an old metal tray with a hint of rust around the edges. This was more like what I expected. It matched the mound of Oreo cookies and the rest of the decor.
    In one corner of the living room sat a green Naugahyde recliner, its footrest stuck out. A wicker basket of yarns, alive with colors from vermilion to a glow-in-the-dark green, rested on the floor next to the chair, as a loyal pet might. Then I noticed the small side table beneath the fluttering lace café curtains in the window.
    A gallery of framed photographs crowded the surface. I went closer and peered into faces of strangers that somehow didn’t seem all that strange. Several portraits were in sepia tones that made people look softer than perhaps they really were. Most were modern snapshots of men and women, children, and a dog or two. My eyes kept returning to one picture of a dark-skinned, bowlegged man dressed in western clothes.
    “We were afraid you wouldn’t come,” Lutie said softly from behind me. “When Joseph up and died, we didn’t know what to do.” I heard her voice catch.
    I picked up the photo of the man in the cowboy outfit and chuckled.
    “Yeah,” she said, “Your dad was always horsin’ around. He was a real character.”
    I stared into his eyes then, as if by doing so, I could tell for sure whether I was the daughter of Joseph Pond. When had I ever been accused of horsing around? Perhaps this was what was rolling around inside me like a shaken can of soda.
    And what about Benjamin, the man Mom married a few years before she died? My stepfather had a nose that turned red whenever he was angry, which was a lot. He had shiny little hamster eyes and a funny chin that blended into his neck. He was mean when he’d had too much gin.
    I saw none of those qualities as I gazed at the man in the picture. Joseph Pond's eyes were dark