The School on Heart's Content Road Read Online Free PDF

out her mouth the way her teeth had. This makes her gray eyes look big and wishful. In Massachusetts, someone had thought her large gray eyes could make him whole. But here she is, back in Egypt, Maine, since Massachusetts “didn’t work out.”
    And now her younger son, Mickey, passes through the living room, coming home from somewhere. Mickey says nothing to his mother, just nods. A nice nod, vaguely friendly.
    Britta says nothing to Mickey, but she watches him pass. The TV could hold her attention in the absence of real life, but nothing can win her regard above and beyond her daughter and sons and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and her men who made it all happen.
    Shyness. Just how shy is Britta Gammon? Well, she has never been able to look anyone in the eye, not even family. And she’s not affectionate. But she’s always there. She is right where you’d expect her to be. Like a sturdy little mushroom.
    Donnie Locke finds whiskey in the cupboard.
    The child Jesse lies soured on layers of sheets in the living room, silent and rigid now, after his last siege of tears, cries that are softer today, for he has no muscle left to belt out his former wildcat yowls.
    His father, Donnie, with the pale walrus mustache and chain-store name tag, comes home from work and stands in the doorway, feeling the doorframe over and over and over.
    He turns to the kitchen, remembering something. When he reappears, he is gripping by the neck a half-full bottle of bourbon that has been in the corner cupboard for years. But you see it is, of course, still good. He knows, as everyone knows, a good drink sometimes helps. He goes to the couch and kneels. At his back, the TV is giving the world and national news. The child’s evaporated monkey-small face turns slowly to the left, toward his father, because he can smell his father, that smell of the great chain store, of its chemically treated fabrics and acres of stock, oceans of stock, with that tidal-wavelike come-and-go rhythm of stock moving, on sale, big sale, big specials, big buys, the universe of all necessity and heart’s content there on display.
    The father strokes the little one’s cool sweaty head, thinking how it is you would interest this child in a drink, in getting drunk, that thing you associate with fun.
    Again, Jesse throws out one rigid leg and lets out a sweet, nearly lovely, small trill of agony, and young Erika flies from the back bedroom, where her two stepdaughters await sleep, for she must be a comfort to them too, the healthy ones, can’t neglect the healthy ones, whose flourishing you must not resent in the shadow of the other’s dying, and Erika is wearing a knee-length lilac nightie, her face so round and pudgy and wifely, but with eyes like a dragon’s, red and terrible, eyes that have not slept for weeks.
    She slumps to the couch at the end where Jesse’s feet are, then sees the ridiculous thing that is in her husband’s hand.
    He, in the seriousness of the moment, becomes taken with a goofy grin. “Hard stuff.”
    No money. No groceries. And now and then no medicine. No money. No groceries. No medicine. The hollow precincts of every commoditized need unmet.
    He adds quickly, “It’ll help him.”
    Erika hisses something, too much teeth and tongue to be audible. No words, just smoke. A dragon. A bitch. No cooing sweet-natured plump cutie. Not today.
    Donnie places one hand behind his son’s head, to lift him, get him ready for a swallow, but the young mother leaps up and drives her knee into her husband’s shoulder as he is squatted there and he says angrily, “If I were in that kind of pain, I’d want this!!!
I’d
want to be passed out!!”
    â€œ
You are nuts!!!!
” Erika shrieks. No fainting fear-stars cross her vision now. Her vision is sharp and actual. Everything in her body and brain is instantly aligned.
    Donnie reaches again for the boy’s head and