Then Came You Read Online Free PDF Page B

pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and gave one to me and one to Trey. My classmates would have howled to see me smoking—to them, I was Bettina the straitlaced, Bettina the pure. The truth was, I only smoked with my brothers, and I only did it because it was one of the rare times they’d let me into their circle and talk to me like a person.
    “Now, I ain’t saying she a gold digger,” Tommy sang. Trey shoved his hands into his pockets and gave a hooting laugh. I rolled my cigarette between my fingers and announced, “If any of those parts are original, then I am the queen of Romania.”
    “Dorothy Parker,” said Tommy, tipping the bottle of beer he’d snagged from the refrigerator toward me in a toast. “Nice.”
    Tommy flicked his lighter and shielded the flame with his hand until my cigarette was lit. I inhaled, blew a plume of smokeinto the starry night sky, and delivered my one-word assessment of our father’s new ladyfriend: “Bitch.”
    “C’mon, Bets,” said Tommy. “Maybe she’s not that bad.”
    “Oh, she’s that bad,” I assured him. I knew her type. India—not that I believed for a second that India could actually be her name—had made an effort during the meal, asking Tommy about his band, Dirty Birdy, and Trey about his daughter and me about my internship appraising European paintings for Christie’s. She let us know that she knew things about us, where we lived and what we liked and what our hobbies were: that Tommy played the bass and guitar, that I collected things—seashells and bottlecaps when I was little; antique compacts and cigarette cases now. She was polite; she was—or at least acted—interested. She’d laughed (“ha . . . ha . . . ha”) when she’d gotten ketchup on the sleeve of her blouse, and hopped up from the table to clear the dishes. All of this should have eased my mind, but there was a hardness about her, something calculated, flinty and unkind. I could see scars behind her ears, beneath her chin. The skin of her cheeks was too taut and her breasts were too big for her frame. Her hair was dyed, her nose was done, and I suspected tinted lenses were responsible for the luminous indigo of her eyes. Who are you, really, I wondered as she rinsed and dried plates and kept up her expert, cheerful chatter. Who are you? And what do you want with my dad?
    “I bet her name’s really something like Tammy,” I told my brothers. Trey just shrugged, and Tommy said, in the calm way that made me crazy, “Trying to make something of yourself isn’t a crime.”
    “Making something of yourself is fine,” I replied. “Getting a boob job, dying your hair, getting your nose done, changing your name, whatever. That’s all fine. I don’t object. But she should make her own money, instead of going after his.”
    “Dad’s a big boy,” said Trey, thumbing his BlackBerry, probably to see if his wife had called or texted or sent pictures of the most recent adorable thing that nine-month-old Violet had done during the three minutes since he’d last checked.
    “And he’s lonely,” said Tommy.
    I exhaled. This was the truly infuriating part. If our father had serially discarded his wives, trading up for younger, hotter models, we’d have rolled our eyes and agreed that he was getting what he deserved with the world’s Indias. But our mother had left him. After all her time in Manhattan, her years as a stay-at-home mom, a PTA volunteer, a fund-raiser for cancer research and the preservation of historic churches, she’d fallen under the sway of her yoga instructor, one Michael Essensen of Brick, New Jersey, who, after a six-week sojourn in Mumbai, had renamed himself Baba Mahatma and opened a yoga center and spiritual retreat five blocks from our apartment. The Baba, as my brothers and I called him, started popping up in passing in my mother’s conversation: The Baba says Americans should eat a more plant-based diet. The Baba says colonics changed his life. A few months