Little Blue Lies Read Online Free

get anything more out of him, I’ll let you know.”
    â€œThanks, Maxie,” I say.
    When we get to the door, Leona appears, standing in the doorway that leads to the living room. She looks haunted, fragile.
    â€œWhere is she, Ma?” Maxine says flatly. “I bet you doknow. Wouldja just say, so he can not worry a little bit?”
    It would not be correct to call the noise from the kitchen a bark. If a bear put its voice into a bark, it would sound like this.
    â€œLeOna!” Ronny calls.
    Leona raises her hand to cover her mouth and nose. Her sigh hisses through the grille of her fingers before she turns and walks back into the living room.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    â€œWhat is wrong with you?” Mom says when I’ve made my third lap of the house. I pace. When I’m trying to think or to unthink, I pace, which makes the machinery of my mind far too visible to the people who know me well.
    â€œNothing,” I say, passing her right by.
    She is sitting at the dining room table, sketching. She has her own study, where most of her contracted commercial design crap gets done, but when she’s in itch-a-sketch mode looking for inspiration, she plunks down wherever the plunkin’s good.
    â€œYour sweat stains say otherwise,” she says.
    It takes about twenty seconds at this pace for me to make the circuit—living room, hallway, dining room, kitchen, hallway, living room again—which gives us both good time to compose snappy retorts for each other by the time I pass through her space once more.
    â€œSweat doesn’t speak,” I say.
    â€œNeither do you, and that’s not healthy. What’s wrong?”
    â€œAre you sketching me?”
    â€œOf course I am.”
    â€œCut it out. You know I hate it.”
    â€œI’ll stop if you stop.”
    She has a giant portfolio of her me-as-salesman portraits. I look like my father, I suppose, only less successful.
    â€œWant to see?” she says as I sit across the table from her.
    I nod weakly.
    Okay, this one is different. She has drawn me the way cartoonists draw two characters chasing each other around a tree—just a blur of circular lines with what looks like my nose and furrowed brow emerging somewhere in the middle of it.
    â€œThat’s instantly my favorite,” I say.
    She looks far more pleased than this kind of statement should make a person. I have to remember how much she cares what I think, what I say. I have not always used my powers wisely there.
    â€œI’m going to frame it,” she says, signing the corner carefully. “You going to talk?”
    I think about it. I decide I am. Sort of.
    â€œThere’s nothing to say,” I say. “I’m just a little concerned about Junie. But it’s probably nothing.”
    She turns the page in her big sketchbook and starts withthe telltale scratchy-sounding strokes and furtive glances that mean I’m sketch material again.
    â€œJesus, Mom . . .”
    â€œShush. Stay still. I mean, don’t shush. But do stay still.”
    â€œFine. Well, we’re not together anymore, so it’s really none of my business. . . .”
    â€œYou are going to have to move on somehow, unfortunately. It’s going to take some time, and some pain.”
    â€œI know. But it’s not just that . . .”
    â€œSpeaking of Junie, did you hear that that awful man over there, that One Who Knows character, won the lottery? Again?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYes. Rumor has it that he’s won the lottery. Again .” My mother hates the way people do air quotation marks with their fingers, and she is constantly at war with what she considers to be the corroding effects of all things cliché, so at times like this, when she says words like those—“won” and “again”—to register her scorn she puts them in italics by placing her hands karate chop fashion