After Her Read Online Free Page B

sister referred to as old-timer’s disease for years before he died, and he had mostly just sat in his chair for as long as either of us could remember. But the idea of anybody wanting to have sex with Helen was pretty funny. The idea of sex was funny, period—funny and terrible and thrilling.
    A FTER OUR FATHER LEFT, WE liked it better outside of our house than in. Inside, things kept breaking, options narrowed. Every month we seemed to have less of everything but unopened bills and the smell of cigarettes. Inside, we could feel the sadness and disappointment of our mother, and as much as we loved her, we had to get away or we’d be swallowed up in it too. But beyond the four walls of our falling-down house, anything was possible.
    We had a game called Ding Dong Ditch that required one of us—always Patty—to ring the doorbell of a house on our street. More often than not the door we’d choose was the one belonging to our next-door neighbor Helen.
    Once she rang the bell, Patty would hightail it to a ditch, or some spot behind a hedge, where I’d be waiting already, watching for the great moment when Helen (or Mr. Evans down the street, or the Pollacks, or Mrs. Gunnerson and her retarded daughter, Clara, if it had been their doorbells my sister rang) would open the door and look out at the empty doorstep with a baffled expression. (Not so baffled after a while, no doubt. Helen in particular had to know it was us, we rang her bell so frequently.)
    Sometimes we picked up rocks in the neighborhood—possibly decorative white rocks originally laid out as part of the edging for a flower bed—and painted them with poster paints, if we had some, or melted crayon wax if we didn’t. Then we sold them door-to-door, very possibly to the people whose houses they’d come from in the first place. We might get a nickel or just a penny. The idea was to save up the necessary funds to buy a Slurpee. Once we’d raised enough (probably just for one) we walked the mile and a half to the mall to buy it. Taking our time, as usual. There was nothing to rush home for.
    But our main diversions lay beyond the neighborhood, to the wilder places beyond it. Morning Glory Court backed up on the outer reaches of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which included a network of hiking trails so vast it stretched from the park’s southernmost borders in San Francisco to a spot almost fifty miles north of that known as Point Reyes. Beyond that lay the entire Pacific Ocean. More than anywhere else—the bedroom we shared, our messy kitchen with its frequently malfunctioning refrigerator and broken oven, or the houses we didn’t go to of the friends we didn’t have—the mountain was where my sister and I spent our days.
    For most children in our neighborhood, the vast expanse of open land abutting our houses had been off-limits, for fear of snakes or coyote attacks or, more likely, poison oak. But Patty and I rambled where we chose. Our only limits: how far our legs could carry us.
    Sometimes we’d make ourselves a picnic—those saltines again, and peanut butter, or possibly just sugar. We’d take it, along with whatever book I was reading or the notebooks I took everywhere to write stories in (and, for Patty, a stack of Betty and Veronica s), and then spend the day out on the mountain. We might make our way to the Mountain Home Inn, at the base of a major trailhead to the mountain, where (at my direction) Patty would race in, bearing no possible resemblance to the kind of person who’d be a registered guest, and fill her pockets with peanuts from the bar, then race out again before anyone could tell her not to.
    After, we might just sit there on the mountain, alongside the trail, or on a rock, splitting grass in two or imagining scenarios of things we’d do if one of us got on a game show and won ten thousand dollars, or (though this was my interest, not my sister’s)