Beautiful Kate Read Online Free

day in hell before you get me into the tub again. Or anywhere else.”
    “Deny me anything but that,” I mourned.
    “Yeah, you’ll see.”
    She angrily flounced out of the bathroom, leaving me with the vision of that splendid tush, as though to rub it in, all that I would be losing.
    “Hey baby,” I called to her. “I’m sorry. I really am. I see things more clearly now.”
    Later that night I lay awake in the too-soft brass bed, with Toni sleeping soundly against me, her right leg draped over mine. And in the penumbral dark, the room seemed slowly to come alive around me, partially lit by the same old farmyard polelight, its rays slanting past the edge of the window shade, forming that remembered pane of whiteness in which even the swimming dust motes were not of now, like the ceiling water stains and the mythic figures I had always seen in them and saw again: Otto Graham passing the football and the even more formidable torso of Anita Ekberg, both having waited all these years just to be seen again by me, to be freed for one more night before melding back into the stains that even Kate had never been able to see as anything other than what they were.
    Often she would sneak in at night and join us, in summer sitting on Cliff’s twin bed or mine, but in winter diving under the covers to stay warm, oblivious of any turmoil such proximity caused us.
    The time I am thinking of, she was thirteen and just beginning to develop, as Cliff was, at fifteen, both of them late bloomers, in sexual development anyway. (In my own case the magic occurred at fourteen, which meant that though I was not as tardy as they were, I was still behind them by a full year—a year that I remember now as the most painful of my young life, a sort of training ground for later. Suddenly the two most important persons in my life, and with whom I had hitherto shared that life as an equal, now treated me as the little guy, the snotnose, and it made me preternaturally nasty. All it would take is one wrong word or condescending look and I would tear into them, trying to reassert my lost equality.)
    But getting back to that particular night. It was shortly after Cliff and I had gone to bed when Kate came slipping in, from the bathroom, as was her habit. And this night, it was my bed she sat on.
    “We gotta do something,” she said. “We just gotta do something.”
    “About what?”
    “ Him , you jerk! Your brother. Don’t you know what Jason’s been doing to him?”
    “What about me?” I protested. “Jason’s been working my butt off too.”
    “Bull!” she said. “He’s always got Cliff doing more. And now there’s the book work besides.”
    I shrugged. “It’s his own fault. It’s your own fault, ain’t it, Cliff.”
    Cliff was lying there with his usual look of battered noblesse oblige, a boy who was not just a good scout but an Eagle Scout, so unfailingly generous and noble and right-thinking that I often wondered how he could make it in the world without Kate and me to protect him.
    “I guess so,” he said. “But I still think it’s important what Jason’s trying to do—teach us the stuff we don’t get in school.”
    Kate looked to the ceiling for strength. “Sweet Jesus, Cliff, it ain’t just the French and Russian Lit—it’s the freaking farm too. Look what he’s got lined up for you there—a few summer chores, he calls it—and it’s more damn work than him and Stinking Joe have done in five years.”
    Cliff did not protest. He was too tired. From ten that morning till after dark the two of us had been bucking hay, tossing the filthy heavy itchy bastards up onto the hay wagon and then unloading them into the barn—while Stinking Joe, the hired man, drove the tractor and Jason himself sat in his air-conditioned library preparing our daily tests in Beginning French and Russian Literature. The difference between us was that Cliff sat in bed now with his light on and Menard’s French grammar propped on his