If Jack's in Love Read Online Free

was Mr. Harris. He’d long held a flame for my mother, and he liked it that she looked like a tart. (When she was growing up in Lakeside, Mr. Harris resided in the house across the street, a henpecked man at the time, now a widower.)
    The walk home was brisk, furious. Mom’s heels were stabbing the macadam. At intersections, looking both ways for cars, and unavailing of the sting, she dug her nails into my shoulder. When we passed the Coghill porch Myra was gone, and I found the pain of not being able to alleviate the shame of our last encounter worse than the shame itself.
    After we got home Mom announced she was going to start work at the Ben Franklin the next week, as a cashier.
    Pop didn’t say anything. It was summer. School was out, baseball was in. He was on the bed listening to a day game on the radio.
    Stan stared for a long time. Mom had whored herself, that’s what he was thinking.
    â€œWhat does that mean, Pop, you’re going to be the housewife?”
    He got up and left the house.
    Later, when the game was over, Pop cut off the radio and rose from the bed.
    I ran to the kitchen. I assumed he was going to raise hell with Mom for getting a job without consulting him. But maybe she did consult him, who knows.
    He sat at the table. Something long and brown, like a strip of bark, was sizzling in the pan. Through the torn screen of the door we could see the tops of the trees blowing as a storm moved in.

    THE WAR AGAINST the Witchers began to escalate about this time. I remember when the war was still cold, when all we had to deal with was the snootiness of our neighbors. Oddly enough, Pop was more trouble then. He gambled, he drank, and perhaps he ran with women. I wasn’t positive on the last score, I only knew what Mom and Stan had hinted at. The legendary days of Pop’s life of sin belonged to my insensate years, when I was small and assumed all was well in the world. I did have shadowy memories of Pop being drunk, but I loved those memories. Pop was fun when he was drunk.
    He straightened himself out only when Mom threatened to leave him for good. He got the job at the refrigeration company and our family was granted two years of domestic calm. Yet that is precisely when the neighborhood hostilities became overt. Maybe no one feared Pop sober. Or maybe it was the increasing militancy of my brother, who rode the streets on his Sting-Ray bicycle, one arm at his side and one arm holding a portable radio to his ear.
    Trouble had arisen over Stan’s wooing of Courtney Blankenship, a clear signal that the Witchers no longer knew their place. The Blankenships were gentry. Mr. Blankenship was the weatherman on Channel Six, and for a half-hour every weekday morning he spruced himself up in a crisp white sailor’s uniform and genially hosted a local children’s program called Ahoy, Mateys , which came on just before Captain Kangaroo . The neighborhood, you understand, instantly realized something needed to be done. A Blankenship gal dating a Witcher? It rallied by enlisting the square-jawed charms of Gaylord Joyner. It was as though a committee had been formed to appoint some local squire the task of coaxing Courtney back to the realm of suburban chivalry. Later, when the seduction was accomplished and she had dumped my brother, Gaylord just as casually dumped her, and promptly was awarded the scholarship to Duke University (although I’m not sure there was a cause-and-effect relationship).
    A day or so after Pop’s pummeling of Kellner, a patrol car pulled up in front of our house. My brother and I were watching through the front window with the missing screen. “It’s a cop,” Stan called.
    Pop jumped from the sofa and took a peek.
    The cop stayed in his car, the way cops do, writing his report and mumbling in his walkie-talkie; and then out stepped a skinny guy wearing glasses who seemed no older than Stan. He peered at our house, verified the number, and made