The Household Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page B

their home. Its fecundity spoke of something unwholesome, depraved. Those two, that house.
    “It’s not normal,” Howie’s wife would say. “Do not even tell me that that is a normal thing!”
    —
    The years passed, his family departed, and Howie was left with Emily and old man Phane. He knew her shifts as well as his own. He knew when she was home sick from school, and at night he could follow her from room to room in her house, and through that make guesses at what she was doing—when she did her homework,ate her supper, watched the TV, when she was talking on the telephone upstairs while Peter thought she was doing her homework. He didn’t stare or obsess; Howie would just glance from a window now and again, unthinkingly, as one checks a clock for the time or the sky for weather.
    Unlike Harri, Emily appeared to have a lot of friends. Boyfriends, too. Howie followed her academic achievements in the local paper—a solid student, Emily M. Phane always made the honor roll, and once or twice the principal’s list—and then what characters she played in the Adirondack Children’s Troupe productions that it didn’t feel proper to attend, though he wanted to, and even waited up after the first night of
Free to Be…You and Me
, trying to gauge by her expression how it had gone. It went great! Likewise her roles in
A Light in the Attic
and
Charlotte’s Web
. To earn money for college, she worked for a few years as a waitress at Davidson Brothers. Howie never visited during her shifts. He did, however, go when he knew she wasn’t working, and he’d imagine the honorable manner in which she served people who couldn’t possibly have appreciated her. He felt bittersweet on her seventeenth birthday when Peter bought her the used Mazda.
    Howie and Peter began to nod more meaningfully at each other once Howie’s wife and daughter left, but that was about it. They never spoke. Sometimes, in the winter, after returning from a night shift at GE, Howie would clear the Phanes’ driveway of snow before they awoke. He generally mowed their lawn after he finished his. The community was comfortable within itself.
    —
    Sometime after Emily received her Mazda, Howie and Harri ran into her at the Aviation Road mall.
    Howie had been called in last minute for a quick shift of quality time. His ex-wife had to work late grading standardized tests and needed him to pick their daughter up from an after-school advanced oil painting class she was taking at Adirondack Community College.Though still a senior in high school, due to her past achievements, Harri had more than qualified for the class and would even be earning transferrable credits. He was proud of her.
    They were at the mall because she needed some art supplies. For Harri, this meant cheap, spangled “Bingo Night” clothing from Sears, kitten-festooned junk from the Dollar Store (“you know, to
melt
”), and even some actual paint—though this was house paint, Sears again, not oil or acrylic. Well, OK. Howie thought that maybe she’d want some new clothing for herself, too, maybe something less black? She did not. Countess Dracula, his ex-wife had begun calling the talented young woman she still refused to call Harri.
    Since Harri rarely came up to Route 29 and since she professed—maybe too strongly—a distaste for motherfucking nature, your so-called natural world, most of the time that Howie and his daughter spent together over the last few years had been walking around this mall or at the movies. They showed old foreign films at the Queens Falls Library most Thursdays and Harri liked having her father take her to these.
    “I can’t watch films with Mom,” Harri once told him. “She makes, like, Mom noises. She’s got to be present in whatever’s going on, you know, letting the characters know whether she agrees or disagrees with their decisions. I think she’s scared of the dark, actually. Scared of letting go. But you disappear, Dad. Disappearing is the