The Glass Castle Read Online Free PDF Page B

were to replace Mary Charlene," Mom said. She told me that she had ordered up a second redheaded girl so Lori wouldn't feel like she was weird. "You were such a skinny baby," Mom used to tell me. "The longest, boniest thing the nurses had ever seen."
    Brian arrived when I was one. He was a blue baby, Mom said. When he was born, he couldn't breathe and came into this world having a seizure. Whenever Mom told the story, she would hold her arms rigid and clench her teeth and go bug-eyed to show how Brian looked. Mom said when she saw him like that, she thought, Uh-oh, looks like this one's a goner, too. But Brian lived. For the first year of his life, he kept having those seizures, then one day they just stopped. He turned into a tough little guy who never whined or cried, even the time I accidentally pushed him off the top bunk and he broke his nose.
    Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
    Mom never seemed upset about Mary Charlene's death. "God knows what He's doing," she said. "He gave me some perfect children, but He also gave me one that wasn't so perfect, so He said, 'Oops, I better take this one back.'" Dad, however, wouldn't talk about Mary Charlene. If her name came up, his face grew stony and he'd leave the room. He was the one who found her body in the crib, and Mom couldn't believe how much it shook him up. "When he found her, he stood there like he was in shock or something, cradling her stiff little body in his arms, and then he screamed like a wounded animal," she told us. "I never heard such a horrible sound."
    Mom said Dad was never the same after Mary Charlene died. He started having dark moods, staying out late and coming home drunk, and losing jobs. One day soon after Brian was born, we were short on cash, so Dad pawned Mom's big diamond wedding ring, which her mother had paid for, and that upset Mom. After that, whenever Mom and Dad got in a fight, Mom brought up the ring, and Dad told her to quit her damn bellyaching. He'd say he was going to get her a ring even fancier than the one he pawned. That was why we had to find gold. To get Mom a new wedding ring. That and so we could build the Glass Castle.

    "DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?" Lori asked me.
    "Of course I do!" I said. "Don't you?"
    "Sure," she said.
    It was late afternoon, and we were parked outside of a bar in the Nevada desert. It was called the Bar None Bar. I was four and Lori was seven. We were on our way to Las Vegas. Dad had decided it would be easier, as he put it, to accumulate the capital necessary to finance the Prospector if he hit the casinos for a while. We'd been driving for hours when he saw the Bar None Bar, pulled over the Green Caboosethe Blue Goose had died, and we now had another car, a station wagon Dad had named the Green Cabooseand announced that he was going inside for a quick nip. Mom put on some red lipstick and joined him, even though she didn't drink anything stronger than tea. They had been inside for hours. The sun hung high in the sky, and there was not the slightest hint of a breeze. Nothing moved except some buzzards on the side of the road, pecking over an unrecognizable carcass. Brian was reading a dog-eared comic book.
    "How many places have we lived?" I asked Lori.
    "That depends on what you mean by 'lived,'" she said. "If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?"
    I thought. "If you unpack all your things," I said.
    We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn't remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars.
    "What do you think would happen if we weren't always moving