Prayers to Broken Stones Read Online Free Page A

waiting. Hoping for a glimpse. I felt like shouting, throwing rocks at them. Instead I sat down on the old tractor tire we used as a sandbox. Very deliberately I poured the red Kool-Aid into the sand and watched the spreading stain digging a small pit.
    They’re digging
her
up now.
    I ran to the swing set and angrily began to pump my legs against the bare soil. The swing creaked with rust, and one leg of the frame rose out of the ground.
    No, they’ve already done that, stupid. Now they’re hooking her up to big machines. Will they pump the blood back into her?
    I thought of bottles hanging. I remembered the fat, red ticks that clung to our dog in the summer. Angry, I swung high, kicking up hard even when there was no more height to be gained.
    Do her fingers twitch first? Or do her eyes just slide open like an owl waking up?
    I reached the high point of my arc and jumped. For a second I was weightless and I hung above the earth like Superman, like a spirit flying from its body. Then gravity claimed me and I fell heavily on my hands and knees. I had scraped my palms and put grass stain on my right knee. Mother would be angry.
    She’s being walked around now. Maybe they’re dressing her like one of the mannikins in Mr. Feldman’s store window.
    My brother Simon came out to the backyard. Although he was only two years older, Simon looked like an adult to me that afternoon. An old adult. His blond hair, as recently cut as mine, hung down in limp bangs across a pale forehead. His eyes looked tired. Simon almost never yelled at me. But he did that day.
    “Get in here. It’s almost time.”
    I followed him through the back porch. Most of the relatives had left, but from the living room we could hearUncle Will. He was shouting. We paused in the hallway to listen.
    “For Chrissakes, Les, there’s still time. You just can’t do this.”
    “It’s already done.”
    “Think of the … Jesus Christ … think of the kids.”
    We could hear the slur of the voices and knew that Uncle Will had been drinking more. Simon put his finger to his lips. There was a silence.
    “Les, think about just the money side of it. What’s … how much … it’s twenty-five percent of everything you have. For how many years, Les? Think of the kids. What’ll that do to—”
    “It’s
done,
Will.”
    We had never heard that tone from Father before. It was not argumentative—the way it was when he and Uncle Will used to argue politics late at night. It was not sad like the time he talked to Simon and me after he had brought Mother home from the hospital the first time. It was just final.
    There was more talk. Uncle Will started shouting. Even the silences were angry. We went to the kitchen to get a Coke. When we came back down the hallway, Uncle Will almost ran over us in his rush to leave. The door slammed behind him. He never entered our home again.
    They brought Mother home just after dark. Simon and I were looking out the picture window and we could feel the neighbors watching. Only Aunt Helen and a few of our closest relatives had stayed. I felt Father’s surprise when he saw the car. I don’t know what we’d been expecting—maybe a long black hearse like the one that had carried Mother to the cemetery that morning.
    They drove up in a yellow Toyota. There were four men in the car with Mother. Instead of dark suits like the one Father was wearing, they had on pastel, short-sleeved shirts. One of the men got out of the car and offered his hand to Mother.
    I wanted to rush to the door and down the sidewalk to her, but Simon grabbed my wrist and we stood back in thehallway while Father and the other grownups opened the door.
    They came up the sidewalk in the glow of the gaslight on the lawn. Mother was between the two men, but they were not really helping her walk, just guiding her a little. She wore the light blue dress she had bought at Scott’s just before she got sick. I had expected her to look all pale and waxy—like when