Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

How can I help it?

Well, what would I do with it if I did have it?

That’s the part I don’t understand.

PART THREE

If I had something,

So I don’t have anything?

I don’t know,

Well, how can I help it?

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Bill Hayward

By the time Mother came back, we really couldn’t remember what she looked like. Father went to pick her up and then suddenly there she was, just exactly the same as always, breathless from running up all the steps, not scrawny and dried up like a prune as she had written us, but beautiful, all familiar golden, with shiny golden hair parted in the middle and bangs across her forehead. We couldn’t let go of her; there wasn’t enough of her to go around, nor enough of us either, scrambling and scrabbling and scratching to be the first, nor enough time to tell her every single thing that had happened since she had left: weekly dinners with Grandsarah and kickball games with Martha Edens; inches grown, weight gained; the great snail invasion when we stuck snails down each other’s shirt and Father paid us to collect them in jars with salt at the bottom, which made them ooze bubbly green slime and shrivel up; the five-foot rattler coiled right under Father’s window one morning that so shocked him when he looked out that he got sick to his stomach all over it, and we kept the rattles to show her as proof of its size; Emily’s new false teeth; Bill’s new real tooth, on and on.

Then she told us every single thing that had happened to her since she left, which made us want to go to England immediately, and after that she said, “My darlings, there’s one more thing I have to tell you—or really Leland and I have to tell you—and I guess I’ve put it off until the very last because …”

Father stood with his hands in his pockets, looking toward the ocean. It was a very clear afternoon, one of those when you could see all the way to Catalina. By the subtle change in her voice, we knew that we should pay attention and stop trying to walk in single file along the narrow brick wall at the edge of the terrace.

“Now stop wiggling around for a minute and come over here. Please. So I can look at you. Just for a minute, then you can go right back.”

We came and stood before her, somewhat gravely, in keeping with her voice.

“I suppose this is a kind of family conference that concerns just the five of us.”

We looked over at Father, who hadn’t shifted his position.

Mother spoke rapidly and earnestly in the tone of voice that she used when she was explaining something new: “What I have to tell you is a little sad and unpleasant but certainly not the end of the world.” She paused and we tried to stand still politely. “You know how much, how very very much your father and I love each other, have always loved each other—and that’s one of the reasons you came to be—and of course we shall always love each other. But you see, sometimes grownups have disagreements, just like children, and get on each other’s nerves, and when that happens, it’s really best, rather than argue and argue, to separate for a little while—maybe a week or two or four—just a trial period, however long it may take to think things over from a more objective vantage point. You yourselves know how hard it is to come to an agreement when you’re right in the middle of a squabble. But that doesn’t mean at all that you stop caring about each other, does it?”

We listened very carefully. It occurred to me that Father had not moved since the beginning of this explanation, and really not at all for about fifteen minutes before it began, as if he were watching for turkey buzzards or flying saucers; it was the time of the flying-saucer scare and we all used to stare up at the skies, imagining.…

“Also it is imperative that you understand that I’m not talking about divorce. This is not the same thing at all.”

I glanced at Father’s back and longed to be standing over there beside him. Divorce. Now there was a word. Where had that come from, sailing out of the clear blue-and-gold sky like the shiny pebble that Bill had once thrown at me, and that I, innocently mistaking it for a piece of mica, hadn’t bothered to duck, so that it hit me squarely on the forehead between the eyes, making them sting. Father had removed himself from all this, probably because it was infinitely worse than watching Mother chop the heads off chickens, although this time I wasn’t lucky enough to be outside the coop with him.

The more frantically my thoughts darted around, the stiller I seemed to stand. Father, I thought, hanging on to his arm in my mind, what is she talking about? Divorce. Explain to her about the night with all the stars, the night you told us, remember?

One night just a month or so earlier, while Mother was still in England, Father and Bridget and Bill and I had all lain together under a blanket on the big chaise longue on the terrace, and while we gazed fixedly at the shimmering black sky and waited for flying saucers and falling stars, Father had told us stories about when he was a little boy. Then he had said, “But the worst thing that ever happened to me—ruined my whole life, really, at least what was left of my childhood—was when my mother divorced my father. Terrible. Terrible. I was only ten, and I never forgave Mother for it, never understood it. So capricious. Ten years old. It cut me in half. Divorce, it’s the most awful thing in the world. I ought to know. You three are very lucky, you’ll never know how lucky you