Beautiful Kate Read Online Free Page A

lap.
    “Sweet Jesus,” Kate said, “you’re really gonna study it. Can’t you for once go in there like we do and just tell him. Sorry, father dear, but I just didn’t have the time .”
    “He won’t take that from me.”
    “Because you never make him, dumbo!” Kate said it loud enough to wake the house.
    “It’s important,” Cliff insisted. “We should learn French. We should know it. We should be grateful we have a father who can teach it to us.”
    To keep her head from exploding, Kate pressed her hands over her ears and fell back onto the bed. She was wearing a pair of Cliff’s outgrown pajamas, with a button missing in front, which prompted me to scrunch down as low as I could get, hoping for a glimpse of one of her budding jugs, as we elegantly called them then. Though I think she sensed what I was up to, she ignored it—Greg after all was still just a snotnose kid.
    She sat up again, wagging her head. “Okay, that’s it. Cliff is so keen on all this, that’s his business. But me and Greg, we just don’t give a dog’s turd about French or The Brothers Karamazov . And we sure ain’t gonna do the freaking chicken house on top of it.”
    This was another of Jason’s summer projects for the three of us: scraping and repainting a superfluous chicken house that he intended to turn into a “theater” in which we were to perform those same ancient French plays we refused to study.
    “We just ain’t gonna scrape all the paint off that thing,” Kate said. “And we ain’t gonna scrub it and repaint it either. And above all, we ain’t gonna convert the freaking place into—what the devil does he call it?—a theatuh in the round! Who for, I’d like to know? Stinking Joe and Emily’s kids? I’m not sure they’re ready for Tartuffe.”
    Cliff tried to explain, pointing out how few visitors were dropping in to see Jason now, and consequently how much time he had on his hands.
    “Fine,” Kate said. “Then let him paint the damn thing. We’ll conjugate his precious French verbs.”
    Cliff could barely hold his eyes open. “Please leave, okay?” he asked her. “I still gotta go through my vocabulary.”
    Kate shook her head and sighed. As she got up I copped the peek I wanted, the bottom curve of one of her tiny jugs. At the bathroom door she stopped.
    “Just let me say this, mes frères . Old Jason’s gonna have to make a choice this summer. His theater or his français . He ain’t gonna get both.”
    I had no idea what she had meant by that pronouncement until a few days later, when the two of us were busy scraping paint off the chicken house in ninety-five-degree heat. Cliff was out mending fence with Stinking Joe, Mother was busy with “her” family, and Jason as usual was involved in some vital intellectual pursuit in the air-conditioned comfort of his library. Because the day was so muggy and hot and the labor ahead of us so long and tiresome, I had tried to “turn off my head,” which was how I thought of it then, the task of trying to outlast agony. So I was not really aware of what Kate was up to until she was well along with her plans. I did know that she was not scraping her share of the paint, but I didn’t know why, not even when a line of laying hens began to file past me, clucking and pecking at the ground as they spread out into the barnyard. I immediately ran around to the front to see how they had escaped from their pen, which adjoined the building. And what I found was Kate crouched inside the wire walls, herding out the last few stragglers. She shushed me with her finger.
    “What’s up?” I asked.
    “You sure you want to know?”
    “Tell me.”
    “Just watch.”
    With all the chickens liberated, I followed her from the pen into the small building. On a platform against one wall six cans of white exterior paint and two gallons of turpentine had been stacked. Kate picked up one of the bottles of turpentine and emptied it onto some bales of straw, also stacked