The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life Read Online Free PDF

unhooked his hammer from the wall of the garage and then held it against Blue’s temple. “How would you feel if I put this through
your
head?” he threatened.
    This was typical of Oliver’s parenting: arming his children with weapons and telling them to shoot, although they didn’t know where they were supposed to aim or why they should do so except to please him. So they aimed, and invariably pointed at the wrong target and ended up with their own heads on the chopping block. It became safer to take aim at themselves in the end. Before he did, and before they hurt anyone else.
    Emma could never pinpoint the moment when she began to realize that being an inventor wasn’t the only thing that set their father apart. She didn’t know what the difference was, but whatever it was, it certainly did invoke fear. Emma’s classmates were scared of her father and didn’t want to come over to the house after she’d turned six. But Emma thought fathers were perhaps built to bully—that it was part of the paternal mandate to reduce children to tears by calling them stupid or lazy, which their father did, not infrequently. It was certainly embarrassing, but it was understandable because it was familiar, and people become fond of the familiar, no matter how strange.
    It was the night after Oliver threatened Blue with the hammer that they built their bubble in the basement. Emma lay in bed looking at the iridescent stars on the ceiling, worrying about her baby brother. She knocked the secret knock on their adjoining bedroom wall and awaited Blue’s reply. The silence from his bedroom was loud enough to make her wonder if the hammer was lodged in his mouth. She crept to his room in her fuzzy Minnie Mouse slippers and checked for him under the duvet, under the bed, and in the closet. No sign of little life. She tiptoed past her parents’ bedroom and down the stairs at the end of the hall. In the green-tiled kitchen, over the drip drip of the tap, she heard the muffled sound of crying coming from the basement. She found Blue down there crouched by the furnace, next to an industrial-sized bag of Purina Puppy Chow, sobbing into his flannel-covered arm.
    She knelt down beside him and made like a mama bird and wrapped him in her wing. He had language now, but they didn’t speak. Even when he did speak to her he didn’t use the language of the rest of the world. It was still all “boo” and “booly boo” and “bambam bolly” when it was just the two of them.
    â€œI know,” she said, in response to his silence. “He doesn’t hate you. But we could pretend we’re orphans.”
    The following week, Oliver told his son he was going to build him a bicycle. Blue didn’t know what to make of this, at once elated by and wary of his father’s gift. He was beginning to get a sense of Oliver’s rhythm. Whenever Oliver knocked him down he would pick him up a week later with some promise: a trip to the butterfly conservatory, a ride on the
Maid of the Mist
, a hamburger with fries and a chocolate milkshake. Those days were the happiest for Blue, even though he knew they would be short-lived.
    Oliver did build him a bicycle—a fast but strange-looking beast over which he took much abuse from the other kids on their street. His dad had built it for him, though, and he was so proud that he would pedal furiously past the taunting and teasing with a baseball cap pulled down so far over his eyes that he could only see the pavement beneath him, never the road ahead. He heard Oliver shout, “That’s my boy!” as he watched him tear off down the street. As Oliver’s boy, he flew without restraint, holding on to the handlebars for his life.
    Oliver did take him to the butterfly conservatory. They stood side by side in a lush, tropical jungle amidst four thousand dancing wings. Oliver narrated the visit with a thousand and one handy facts