The White Horse Read Online Free PDF Page B

the highest court .
    There’s not much evidence from my mother’s childhood; Granny didn’t save stuff like photographs or school papers. There were too many kids, too many moves, no camera. Only one picture I used to study, my mother at ten, in a plaid school dress; her bangs haphazard, her face so solemn, you’d think she’d seen what was lying ahead .
    Granny says she was a smart girl. The teachers loved her. Did well in school. Made the honors list. But then she changed, for no reason, she—
    Liar! You knew what he was doing to me! You let him!
    No, Granny insists. You never told me .
    I did! You called me a slut, remember?
    On and on, the facts as hazy as the smoke from their cigarettes. Granny lives downtown in a studio apartment. She takes the bus to my mother’s. They play cards together. The past is a scab they can’t leave alone .
    â€œShe loves you, Raina. It’s just hard for her to show it.”
    Granny’s treating me to lunch downtown, at a hamburger stand open to the street. We’re supposed to be talking about my life and figuring out how to fix it .
    â€œSee, the problem was my second husband,” she explains.” He and the kids didn’t get along.”
    He beat them bloody, according to my mother. The belt buckle cut them .
    â€œSo I married Fred.”
    Who turned out, to no one’s surprise but hers, to be another child molester. She thought she couldn’t live without a man; that a bad one was better than none .
    â€œWhich turned out to be a big mistake,” Granny adds. As if I don’t know how this story ends. “By the time I knew what was going on, it was too late.”
    For Granny and my mother. For my mother and me .
    â€œYour mother doesn’t understand,” she says. Her cheeks are wrinkled. She’s only fifty. People stream past; they look like Granny, old faces with the eyes of frightened children. “Well, I’ve gotta get back to work, honey. If I’m late, the boss’ll kill me.”
    She kisses my cheek and gives me ten bucks .
    Who was the monster: my mother or Granny?
    I remember happy times, my mother laughing. Or maybe that was a show on TV. A show about a family with lots of kids. Too many kids. You kids shut up. Too many men. Lock the door, Daddy’s drunk! Fists punching through the wood. Don’t hit my mother! Cops coming. Blood streaming from my mother’s nose .
    When the welfare check came at the first of the month we’d beg her, Mom, please pay the rent. Pay the rent. They’re gonna kick us out. Buy food, Mom. Please. Sometimes she listened, sometimes she didn’t, because she’d found a way to make the problems disappear. Fairy dust, white powder, gobbled up her problems. Had her laughing in the kitchen, tossing Bobby in the air. Watch the baby, Granny said. Gobbled up all the money until the problems got so huge, they filled the house and crashed through the roof and the rain came in .
    She always found another place. She was dealing by then, bringing in two, three thousand a week. When she wasn’t in jail. Or scraping by on food stamps. Or making hash pipes with her girlfriends in the kitchen while the kids ate Sugar Smacks out of the box and the milk was gone so the babies drank Kool-Aid .
    One time I asked her: Did you use when you were pregnant with me?
    Cigarette smoke curled out of her nose. Obviously, she said .
    I spy on her sometimes, trapped behind a checkout line at Kmart, in that ugly jacket with a badge that says HELLO, I’M CARLA! HOW CAN I HELP YOU? ; ringing up things on a cash register with a sign that reminds her to GREET SMILE THANK .
    She looks so beaten. She used to seem big. She used to be a kid, someone like me. A long time ago. She wanted life to be different. Then Bobby died, but that’s another story .

Chapter Eight
    The computers finally arrived. No printers. No software. Am I supposed to create my own? On the phone