Half Wild Read Online Free Page B

wall and made a loud ticking sound I knew so well that sometimes I couldn’t hear it when I tried. On top of the clock sat little wooden turtles and rabbits and birds my dad had carved for both of us years ago.
    She looked again at the clock. It read seven thirty, which meant my dad should have been back a few hours ago, which meant he and Davie, the guy he built houses with, had either broken down or were smoking a joint at the river.
    She licked her dry lips and looked at the door. It had warped over the years and now a half-inch gap of outsidelight shone between the door and the frame. Once she had asked him to fix it, so he took some duct tape and pasted a strip over the gap. “There,” he said, grinning, laying the duct tape on the table. The strip of tape still hung there, half peeled down, the sticky part dull with cobwebs.
    My mom turned the tap water on, and the light over the kitchen sink flickered. She had asked him for real electricity too, not the long cord strung from tree to tree through the woods up from his parents’ house that made the lights flicker every time she used the blender or ran water. My dad just laughed and left the room when she asked for that.
    I heard his truck coming up the driveway and went outside. When I was young we drove that red Ford to Florida and camped in a tent surrounded by pines. We cooked on a Coleman stove, and my mom’s skin turned a beautiful brown; there are pictures. There’s also a picture I took of the two of them dancing barefoot on the beach at dusk, my mom’s neck tipped back, her mouth wide with laughter.
    My dad hopped out of the truck and came toward me. “There’s my beauty!” he called out, scooping me up and swinging me around in a circle. His eyes were bloodshot and he was grinning. He set me down and looked at the house. “How’s Lyn?”
    We walked inside together. She didn’t look up, just kept chopping her vegetables, the knife making little scratching sounds on the board. “And beauty number two,” he said, quiet, breathing.
    He went around the counter to where she stood and put his arms around her waist, placed his thumbs on her hip bones. “I said hello, beautiful,” he said into her ear. Then he looked at me, his eyes glistening. He was stoned, I could tell. I loved him when he was stoned; he talked to both of us this way. My mom stopped chopping her vegetables and closed her eyes. The cotton of her shirt went up and down with her breath. Then she pushed him away with her elbow. “Go take a shower.”
    We ate dinner at the table out in the yard: rice and veggies and a can of pintos my mom opened up. She didn’t even heat them on the stove, just dumped a pile onto each of our plates. My dad got a six-pack from his truck and opened a bottle and told us about his week. He told my mom this was the biggest house they’d ever built, that he was going to make a profit. “I’ll buy you any goddamn thing you want,” he said, grinning, leaning over and pinching my thigh.
    My mom poured some white wine into a Ball canning jar. She took small sips and squinted out toward the view. She was doing that thing she did, I knew: trying, with her eyes, to make the hills flat, pretty. Turn them into poetry. They used to belong to my dad’s parents. Now they were just black silhouettes spotted in ugly houses, the sky behind them the blue of my dad’s eyes, and mine.
    He set his beer down and looked at my mom. “Okay few days, Lyn?”
    She took another sip of her wine. “It was all right.”
    Their faces were shadows. My dad leaned down and unlaced his boots, slid his feet out of his boots and socks, rested them up on the bench between us. They were pretty like a woman’s: pale from being inside his boots all the time.
    My mom got up and cleared the plates and took them into the kitchen. I heard water running and the kitchen light flickered. Mosquitoes