The Late Child Read Online Free PDF

said, still being matter-of-fact. “We don’t need you getting blood poisoning, on top of all this.”
    â€œIt was just a glass I broke, it had just come out of the dishwasher,” Harmony said. Though she had not talked to her sister in a long time, she knew that Juliette had been right and that Neddie, her sister, had been exactly the right person to call. Gary might have gone into hysterics, he was prone to them, though mostly from getting his heart broken by boys he fell in love with who didn’t reciprocate. In other kinds of crises Gary was pretty stable, but no one in the whole world, so far as Harmony knew, was as stable as her sister Neddie Haley. Already Harmony had begun to dread the moment when she would have to hang up. Probably Neddie didn’t have a Portaphone but Harmony had afantasy that she did and the two of them just kept talking while Neddie gathered up Pat and got to the airport and flew to Las Vegas and arrived at Harmony’s apartment. It was an absurd fantasy, she could never afford to pay for a phone call that long, and anyway Neddie was frugal and would no doubt cut her off at some point even if Portaphones did exist in Tarwater. But it was a comforting fantasy too: if she could just keep her big sister on the line indefinitely maybe the tearing, ripping feeling wouldn’t split her apart so badly that she couldn’t be a stable mom when Eddie woke up, expecting a waffle and clean clothes to wear to school.
    â€œYou better let me call Pat, she’s wild in the head these days and there’s no telling what she might say if you and her get into it,” Neddie advised. It was plain that she was about ready to hang up and start making plane reservations and doing other matter-of-fact things.
    â€œI know she thinks I’m a bad mother, she always has,” Harmony said—and it was true, her sister Pat had always disapproved of almost everything she did, particularly her behavior as a mom. When Pat discovered that Harmony had let Pepper go off to New York alone, at the age of seventeen, to dance in a Broadway show, she informed Harmony immediately of her absolute disapproval.
    â€œPepper’s a teenager, she has absolutely no business being alone in a place like New York City,” Pat informed her the first time the subject came up.
    â€œHow would you know what kind of place New York is? You’ve never been there,” Harmony replied, trying to keep calm. Pat was blunt when she was talking to Harmony—she just treated her like a little sister who couldn’t possibly know much. She had hurt Harmony’s feelings with her bluntness hundreds of times, over the years.
    â€œYou’ve never been anywhere,” Harmony had informed her, at the time. “I wish you wouldn’t try to tell me how to raise my daughter. She’s in a Broadway show and this is a wonderful opportunity for her.”
    â€œYeah, opportunity to become a drug addict or to get mugged or to get AIDS,” Pat said. “I’ve seen those crack neighborhoods they have up there—they show them on TV.”
    â€œI’m sure Pepper doesn’t live in a crack neighborhood,” Harmony replied, although she had never been in New York either and was not quite as convinced as she would have liked to be that Pepper was living in a safe neighborhood. Really, she didn’t know how Pepper lived, other than that she had an address on East Ninth Street. She had plenty of maternal worries herself. Gary had informed her that eight million people lived in New York City—that was too many people even to imagine, and some of them were bound to be unsavory characters. That was a phrase Jackie Bonventre had been fond of before he died—in his view unsavory characters were men who were stingy at the craps tables, ate too much garlic, and got his showgirls pregnant.
    But Pat was not convinced by anything Harmony said, and she never had been. When they