Little Blue Lies Read Online Free Page A

alongside her face at 45 degree angles and chopping the air. That she also goes bug-eyed and lurches forward when she does it is, I believe, involuntary.
    â€œWhere did you hear that rumor ?” I say, chopping crazed italics in the air.
    â€œYour father brought it home from the office, naturally.”If there is a financial transaction, legitimate or otherwise, that happens in this state at ten in the morning, those guys are discussing it over lunch.
    He’s not a bad guy, my father. But if water were money, he’d be a fish.
    And as for money folk, they don’t come any fishier than One Who Knows. He may not have actually won the lottery that time a few years back, but he certainly collected it. Very publicly too, so everyone could see. See, it is commonly known in that neighborhood that anyone in the area who wins the lottery in any meaningful way should come to Juan with the ticket. I was never clear about what the deal on offer was, but I got the impression it involved the winner being paid a generous chunk of the cover price of that windfall, tax free, combined with a job for life and all the fringe benefits implied by joining the select company of Juan’s nearest and dearest.
    And if the famously work-shy Juan was able to show everybody, especially his ninety-seven-year-old mom and his neighbors and the Internal Revenue Service his great honest good fortune on the evening news, well, a feel-good story all over it surely was.
    A sweet deal, some might say, and one reason the man so famously splashes out on tickets for almost everybody he meets. If you couldn’t really tell which tickets you bought on your own and which were the result of the large largesse ofthe man himself, well, then maybe all tickets were his tickets. He spikes the punch, it’s his buzz as much as yours.
    He tended to see it that way anyway.
    â€œGood for him,” I say. “Such a lucky, lucky guy, huh?”
    â€œIndeed. Hey, maybe he would like to have his portrait done to commemorate the fortuitous moment. I could do that thing they do, the Roman emperor approach, where I do him from the shoulders up, robe hanging off him, hair all slicked down and ringed with a laurel wreath?”
    I picture it and I laugh, and some of the tension I felt earlier washes away as I watch the crinkly lines at the corners of my mother’s eyes deepen. She is happy, grinning away and scribbling, and this is something we can enjoy, do enjoy, having fun at somebody’s minor expense. But somebody who invites it, of course.
    â€œHey,” I suddenly say. “You’re doing it to me right now, aren’t you?”
    She giggles and scribbles.
    â€œFine,” I sigh. “Show me.”
    Yup indeed. It’s toga-party me, laurel leaves and all, and she has even gone to the trouble of giving me those Roman bangs that make it look like I cut my own hair. And I still look like I’m selling something.
    â€œCan I have it?” I ask.
    She is beaming, like a kid.
    â€œIt’s not that big a deal, Mom. I wish you wouldn’t be like this. It puts a lot of pressure on me.”
    She is signing the portrait with a flourish. “And God knows you don’t need any more of that, Mr. Pace Car. You’re pretty torqued up already.”
    â€œYeah. It’s just . . . Yeah, sorry. I’ll be all right.”
    She hands me over the sketch and then goes all weird coy on me.
    â€œListen, if you need to . . .” She does this awkward head tilt and thumb point in the direction of upstairs, and the pained expression that comes over her makes me sympathy wince.
    â€œWhat?” I say. “If I need to what?”
    â€œYou knowwww.” She drags it out agonizingly. “You might have to . . . relax , and I’ll just leave you to it. I won’t bother—”
    â€œMom!” I say, and jump up from the table. I instinctively know that I will someday laugh my head