I Don't Have a Happy Place Read Online Free

an hour. I wanted to be Rich Little when I grew up and this was a great way to hone my craft. Samantha played along, but she didn’t do the voices like I did. Her heart wasn’t in it.
    Whenever we’d play, I’d make sure to include a mention of the Special Spoon in some creative way. Sam would raise her tiny blond eyebrows, but I knew deep down she was as mad about that spoon as I was, no matter what her eyebrows said. She swore her mother threw away Baby Alive after the drowning, but I wasn’t convinced. I would bet anything that she was stashed in a dresser somewhere, brown crusty death water sloshing aroundin her belly every time someone opened a drawer. I should have taken her home that day. Popped her head off and hung her outside to dry properly. I would have loved her even if she were filled with maggots. Sam never said another word about our baby and I never got over it, even when she got the fully poseable Bionic Woman Doll with Special Purse and the Bionic Beauty and Repair Station with Scenic Backdrop.
    Months after Paulette died, I’d still see her arms thrashing around in my head before I fell asleep. I wanted to ask Ace if he saw anything in his mind at night, or if he thought Paulette swallowed half the lake water and rounded out like a giant balloon, but then I remembered lying in bed the night it happened, and how when I asked him if he saw the body pulled out by the seaplane, instead of answering me, he launched pellets from Neil’s target practice rifle at my head, assuring me that if they made contact, my bed would blow up instantly, and also did I hear that crunching outside, because it sounded an awful lot to him like Bigfoot loping around our window.
    The Narveys got themselves a new babysitter from an agency. Elicia was also from Trinidad and had asthma so bad they had to keep an oxygen tank near Sam’s Barbie Dreamhouse in the basement, just in case there was an incident while vacuuming. She had a small color set in her room, and on Sunday mornings she’d let us watch church with her on TV. When Neil acted up, she’d pinch his neck skin with a maneuver she called the Clinch. I wondered if she swam.
    The following year we got a sitter of our own to live full-time in the basement of our modest three-bedroom Spanish Tudor. Her name was Hortense. She was French-Canadian and wore this complicated hairdo, the likes of which I’d only see a few years later on Mrs. Garrett in The Facts of Life . Hortense was not winning any popularity contests with me, not only because shespoke in clipped bossy tones and didn’t like me, but also because she made me drink glasses of milk no matter how many times I tried to convince her it was against my religion.
    Hortense didn’t believe in television and wore a dental-hygienist–blue uniform even though no one asked her to. Eight months into her stay, when the phone rang at three a.m., I bet my mother fumbled for her glasses just before she picked up the receiver to hear the news that Hortense’s sister had been murdered, somewhere near St. Joseph’s Oratory, a landmark Montrealers called the Shrine. There were no screams or seaplanes or first-class tickets to the Caribbean. Just a starched uniform left on the bed, like a police chalk outline of a housekeeper, and a call to the agency for a new sitter.

Latchkey
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    I t was happening all over the neighborhood. Street by street, mothers appeared in kitchens wearing slimming slacks, announcing their news over the crunch and smack of Melba toast and cottage cheese. I like to imagine that the mothers decided upon the changes at hand conspiratorially at an outdoor meeting that took place shortly after The Joker’s Wild . Weather permitting, they’d each show up wearing special garb, like zip-up jumpsuits or, even better, long black hooded robes. Sadly, we lived in a suburb heavily populated by Jews, not