You Will Know Me Read Online Free Page A

darting from one to the next.
    And Coach T. laughed.
    They all did.
      
    Later that night, their minds racing, their hearts thumping too wildly to sleep, she and Eric sat at the kitchen table and drank dusty bourbon from juice glasses and tried to calm themselves.
    It felt as it did after big competitions, when together they’d break it all down, everything that had happened, tell it and retell it until the kitchen table hummed with warmth and achievement.
    But this time it took a turn, and here was Eric, his eyes bleary, pained, talking about something a judge had said, and about Devon’s “cross to bear.”
    “I’m telling you, he was talking about her foot. That she’d never get that balance perfect, not without two fewer toes on her left foot to even it out.”
    Despite countless conversations about Devon’s body, her development, her strength, her preternatural calm and focus, she and Eric almost never talked about her foot. About the accident.
    “Oh, Eric,” Katie said, wrapping her hands around his forearms. “Like Coach T. says, she figured out long ago how to compensate and—”
    “I think about it sometimes, Katie,” he said, nudging closer toward her.
    For a second, Katie thought he might say something, an admission. I can’t believe I didn’t see her. I can’t believe I was so careless—
    In all marriages, there are questions you never ask. Instead, Katie could only wonder, less and less as the years went by, how Eric could have left unattended, even for a moment, that relic of a mower, hustled from a garage sale, when he knew it didn’t shut off like it was supposed to. Why he’d taken that chance in spite of the way Devon followed him everywhere, all the time, scurrying after him like an eager, pink-tongued puppy.
    “I think about what we did,” he continued.
    His words landing fully.
    “What we did,” she began, head tilting. “We—”
    “She was different before,” Eric said. “Devon was. Before the accident.”
    And the we drifted away, forgotten. Bourbon-obscured.
    She knew he meant different in ways that went beyond the peculiar maceration at the top of her foot, the places two angel-ear toes had once wiggled.
    She wished she weren’t so drunk, could stop a million tiny, pushed-away thoughts from scurrying across her brain. About Devon, about the lonesomeness of her daughter’s life, about—
    So she spoke instead, to stop the thoughts.
    “She was only three when it happened,” she insisted. “There was no Devon before.”
    Feeling the bourbon whirl inside her, a heat under her eyes, she said it once, then said it again.
    “There was no Devon before.”
      
    In bed that night, her throat scraped dry from drinking, her head muddied and hot, Katie remembered something that had happened not that long ago. She’d walked into the TV room, thick with trophies and the tilting ribbon rack, and saw Devon, her feet propped up on the sofa, her shins aching, rubbing Zim’s Crack Creme on those ragged gymnast feet, the white of the lotion making her foot bright, conspicuous, a white worm wriggling.
    Walking by, Katie had plucked at her daughter’s greased toes, saying, cooing even, “Take care of my girl’s magical Frankenfoot.”
    A week later, Eric had confided to Katie that Devon had come to him to ask if she could start wearing Dance Paws at the gym so it would be harder for people to see. Because even Mom thought her foot made her look like a monster.
    Hearing it was like a punch in the stomach.
    “Why didn’t she say something to me?” she asked Eric, and he said she was probably embarrassed.
    She always assumed Devon never really thought about it, the telltale white rings of scar tissue banding her forefoot. It just doesn’t feel as much , she confided once. She had less sensation there, and could hold the beam longer without pain. But she never felt pain anyway. Not like the other girls. Besides, her feet, both of them, were, more than anything else, the feet of all