The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' Read Online Free PDF Page B

throaty growl. Deer, I figured. Too heavy-footed for squirrels. “Easy, boy,” I told Chet, and the three of us stood there, listening to the silence. A few seconds later, the crackling recommenced and she emerged from the woods in all her chaotic glory: Velvet Hoon.
    Remembering that our dogs freaked her out, I grabbed them by their collars. “Got ‘em!” I called. The phrase “all bark, no bite” could have been coined for our mutts; couple of wimps, those two. But to tell you the truth, it was a relief to see Velvet afraid of
something.
Eyeing my hold, she entered the yard in full freak regalia: halter top, exposed flab, hacked-off tuxedo pants, and those Bozo-sized men’s workboots of hers, spray-painted silver. Her shaved head had grown out in the months I hadn’t seen her. Now she was sporting a butch cut, dyed bread-mold blue. Watching her make a beeline for the picnic table, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. Short and squat, she moved like R2-D2. She climbed from the bench to the tabletop and fumbled for a cigarette. Having secured higher ground and sucked in a little nicotine, her cocky stance returned.
    “Maureen home?” she called.
    “Mrs. Quirk, you mean?” I nodded. Watched a shiver pass through her. What did she expect, exposing that much belly in weather where you could see your breath? “I’ll tell her you’re out here.” I’d be damned if I was going to let her back in the house. “You need a jacket?”
    Instead of answering me, she screamed at the barking dogs. “Peace
out
! Shut the fuck
up!”
Her shouting made them nuts.
    Back inside, I called up the stairs. “Cinderella’s here!”
    “Already? I told her nine o’clock.”
    “Must have been a hell of a shortcut. She arrived through the woods.”
    No response.
    “I’m heading out now. Gonna run out to Bear Creek and back.”
    Nothing.
    “Don’t let her in here unsupervised, okay?” One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand …
“Maureen
!”
    “Okay! Okay!”
    In the mud room, I grabbed my wool-lined jacket and headed back out. Velvet was still on the picnic table, but sitting now, smoking.“Here’s a loaner,” I called. I balled up the jacket and tossed it underhand. It fell short by a foot or two, landing on the frosty grass. She looked down at it but didn’t move. “Make sure you stub out that cigarette when you’re done,” I said. She took a drag, blew smoke toward the sky.
    “You find my book yet?” I said.
    “I didn’t
take
your freakin’ book.”
    She looked away before I did. I turned and jogged down the driveway. If she wanted to freeze out there rather than pick up the jacket, then let her. It wasn’t like she was doing
me
any favors.
    It was a tough run. My lungs burned, my throat felt fiery from what was probably a cold coming on. Even at the top of my game, I’d never fully acclimated to running at those altitudes. “Your red blood cells adjust in a few days, Caelum,” Andy Kirby had told me once. “It’s your head that’s the problem.” Andy’s a marathoner and a math teacher. Andy, Dave Sanders, and I used to eat lunch together during my first year on the faculty. Dave was the girls’ basketball coach, and he followed the UConn women pretty closely—closer than I did. Good guys, Dave and Andy were, but during my second year at Columbine, I started bringing my lunch and eating in my room. I don’t know why, really; I just did. For a while, the kids—the needy ones—would squint through the window in my classroom door and want to visit me during my duty-free lunch. After a while, though, I got smart. Cut a piece of black construction paper and taped it over the glass. With the lights off, the door locked, and the view blocked, I was able to eat in peace.
    See, that’s what Maureen didn’t get: that sometimes you had to play defense against that wall of adolescent neediness. Her job in the nurse’s office was half-time, which meant she could leave at noon. But more often than