Riding Fury Home Read Online Free Page A

the road. A long curved driveway led to the front of the house, where a windowless cement-block facade squatted fortresslike against the intruding world while the back of the house opened to acres of light and green.
    On that back side, an open living space was framed by a two-story wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, interspersed with several tall French doors leading to a patio. From within, the view shimmered with green foliage: A lawn edged with mulberry, apple, and pine trees sloped to a woods of tall black walnut trees, maples, and oaks. Through the middle of the woods, a path led to the river, where we had a dock and a tethered rowboat.
    It was a life facing nature, turned away from community. My parents played classical music on the Heathkit record player my father had assembled. Every night, in order to go to sleep, I needed my lullaby: Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 played full blast on the living room hi-fi so I could hear it in my bedroom. I lay in bed with my door open as the record spun, washed by the rhythmic beat of the violins, their frenetic optimism lulling me.
    Even at five, I sensed that we were different from our neighbors, and that difference seemed better. We were more elevated and cultured, and I felt lifted, wrapped in the protection of superiority.
    We had lived in the house two years the day it all shattered. The day my mother held my father’s rifle to her head and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 6. School Days
    WITH MOM GONE, EACH day after the school bus dropped me off there was a gap of two unsupervised hours before Dad arrived home from work. Dad’s first attempt to cover that gap was to hire thirteen-year-old Judy Gifford to baby-sit me. It didn’t last a week. For the first couple days, I went over to the Giffords’ after school, but I didn’t like their house because it smelled like cat pee and Judy’s younger sister was mean and teased me.
    Dad then said that all I had to do was stop over at the Giffords’, a half-block from our house, and report to Judy my plans, and after that I was free to go home to play by myself. Although I was barely seven, having to check in with Judy offended me. If Mom wasn’t there to take care of me, I would allow no one else to. I can take care of myself, I thought fiercely. For several days, I didn’t show up at Judy’s, running from the school bus straight to our backyard. She gave up the job in disgust, and my father relented.
    We made a new arrangement. As soon as I got home, I went into the front hall, where the black rotary phone sat on an end table,
and called my father at the lab. Once I checked in, I would go up to my room and play with my plastic palomino horse, making up elaborate tales while I cantered him over my bedspread.
    As time went on, my father arranged for me to stay after school with different families who had kids my age. For a while, I went to a family out on River Road after school, but Dad stopped letting me go there after the father was charged with shooting his rifle at some neighbor kids who were pestering him.
    Over time, I stayed with quite a few families. I watched the mothers.
    Ann’s mom was a school bus driver. On the days I went to stay with them, after school, I boarded her mom’s bus to go home with Ann instead of to my own house. Ann lived on a dairy farm out in the rolling land beyond the encroaching tract homes of Hillsborough. We would ride through the flatlands, dropping kids off at their pastel ranch homes until the bus was empty of all but Ann and me. Then it was like we got our own special ride in the big bus. I loved to watch her mom’s back as she drove, the decisive pull of her shoulder and arm as she reached for the long metal handle and opened and closed the squeaky bus door.
    At last, we would pull into their driveway and park the yellow bus in the roundabout in front of the barn, next to the green John Deere tractor. Ann and I spent the afternoons running