After Her Read Online Free Page A

picnics, in the old days when our parents were together, and we used to spend Sundays with our parents at Golden Gate Park. (Maybe we only did that once, but we remembered it.) If the evening was cool, as evenings tended to be by that hour, we’d huddle close to each other and wrap the blanket around ourselves. If there were saltines at our house or those little packets of oyster crackers people buy to scatter into their soup (though for our mother, those sometimes amounted to breakfast), we’d have brought those along to munch on while we watched.
    Charlie’s Angels was a favorite, but Tubby and Helen seldom watched that one. After Tubby died, Helen’s personal preference appeared to be Little House on the Prairie —a show that got on our nerves. But she also tuned in to Brady Bunch reruns. Eight o’clock every night, the show came on, and we’d be there on the hillside out back, waiting.
    You had to squint to see the faces on the screen, from the outside, but we knew well enough what all the characters looked like that it didn’t matter. There they’d be, the nine happy-looking faces of Mike and Carol Brady and their six children and housekeeper, each one occupying a separate box on the checkerboard displayed across Helen’s TV screen. We couldn’t hear the sound, of course, but we could get the basic idea and make up the rest.
    â€œI think Cindy’s in some kind of trouble,” I told Patty during one scene. Not very big trouble. We always knew it would work out. In our version of the show, in which we supplied the dialogue to accompany the silent images flickering on the screen in Helen’s living room, Mike could turn to Carol and tell her he was leaving her and running off with the housekeeper, Alice (this was so implausible as to be funny), or one of the kids needed a kidney transplant, and they had to figure out which of the others was a match. (Lots to choose from, luckily.) I made up a story where Marcia got pregnant, and one of Mike’s sons was the father. Not a blood relative, so at least their baby wouldn’t be retarded.
    In some ways watching the show this way, without the virtually needless element of dialogue, allowed for a level of entertainment that the real show—the one Helen was watching from the comfort of her blue Barcalounger—failed to deliver. Outside, Patty and I would be practically wetting our pants from laughing so hard, while in her living room, there sat Helen, knitting some sweater and taking a sip from her cup now and then.
    What was in that cup anyway?
    â€œI bet she’s a wino,” I told Patty. “She just pours her whiskey in a coffee cup so people won’t suspect.”
    â€œShe wouldn’t need to hide it in her own house,” Patty pointed out. “She’s not expecting that we’re looking in the window at her.”
    â€œSo what do you think is going on?”
    â€œMaybe the Bradys got a dog,” Patty offered. She was always working hard to keep up with her own interesting contributions to our conversations, but sometimes it was hard for her thinking up ideas. One topic that held abiding interest for her, however, was dogs.
    â€œThen what?” I said.
    â€œThey named him Skipper.”
    Other times, the story lines I thought up concerned the people whose living rooms we looked into, rather than the shows on their television screens.
    â€œMaybe Helen sneaks into people’s houses when they’re away at work and steals their jewelry and money,” I suggested. “Maybe Tubby figured it out, and she killed him, and now she keeps his body in the basement. That’s why she’s always burning those vanilla candles. To cover the smell.
    â€œShe got fed up with him asking her to cook him dinner all the time, so she did him in,” I went on. “He was always wanting to have sex.”
    In fact, Helen’s husband, Tubby, had been suffering from what my