The Patron Saint of Liars Read Online Free PDF Page A

from every time I'd stopped before what the other body wanted from me. My hand raking up hard from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head, then down, inside the collar of his shirt, then back between us, working down the front of my dress until my arms came out of the sleeves and went back to his waist. Where was he? God help me, I don't remember him, not until the point he held my arms and pushed me back. Held me there and looked at me, and when he was afraid and couldn't look again he folded me back into my clothes and buttoned my dress and looked for the two buttons that were gone but couldn't find them in the dark, in the sand. He picked up the white sack with his dinner which had fallen from his hand and brushed the hair out of my face and took my hand and led me back to the car. He drove me home without saying a word and walked me to my door and didn't kiss me good night. He called me the next night for a date and the night after that and the night after that. He married me at the end of the summer in Our Lady of Lourdes and Father O'Donnell said the mass and his parents and his two sisters came down from Victorville and we moved into the married students' apartments and my mother cried but did so quietly in the kitchen while I took out the last of the boxes, and the next year he got a job teaching math in a high school in Marina del Rey. That is everything. That is all there was to know.

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    M Y MOTHER knew how to drive but didn't. She said she'd forgotten. She'd forgotten how to ride in a car as well. She would walk everyplace she possibly could. If it was raining, she would wear jeans and a sweatshirt, wrap her work dress in a dry cleaner's bag, and put it in with her shoes and purse in one of the large, plastic I. Magnin's bags we kept stacked beneath the kitchen sink. If she had to go someplace far from home she took the bus, but she didn't like to. She said it was dirty and crowded and she didn't like to sit next to strangers. If there was an emergency, a terrible emergency, she would call a cab or Mr. Lipton, the superintendent of the building, to come and drive her. She did the night I was five years old and my eardrum burst. She did when I was fourteen and ran a fever so high I couldn't tell her who she was, even though she asked me over and over again. They took my appendix out, and when I was well Mr. Lipton drove me home, but Mother walked, because going home was not an emergency.
    It's no great mystery. It was because my father had died in a car. But he didn't die in a car. He died later, in the hospital, which is the thing that makes the story tragic instead of just very sad. The car got away from him somehow, forgot gravity despite its weight, and flipped three times before digging itself into a sidewalk where no one was walking. His spine was nothing but dust. "Bone dust," my cousin told me secretly in the back yard of my uncle's house when I was seven. He was the one who gave me the details. I never got them from my mother, I never asked. It took him five weeks in intensive care to finish what had been started. It was there my father died of pneumonia, which, from what I understand, is like drowning.
    But I loved to drive, the way people love forbidden things. Thomas taught me soon after we were married. He was a patient teacher and loved the fact that he could do something for me, though I wondered if later he regretted ever showing me how. We would sit on the cement steps in front of our apartment building, next to the red hibiscus that the gardener was always having to clip back so it wouldn't completely block the front door. I rolled my shorts up as far as I could, trying to get a little color on my legs while Thomas quizzed me from the safety manual. "At what point in a rainstorm are the streets most dangerous?" he asked. "Who would go through the intersection first, if two cars arrived at the same time?"
    While I was taking the test, he went and bought me flowers and I wondered if the high