Read Online Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg - Free Book Online Page B

and me against the world .
    Safety was not what attracted Lydia to Earl Morey. What she loved about him was that he made her laugh. Sometimes she’d laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe, which would egg him on more. In high school, he had a short fuse, was a bit of a bully, and more than a few times was called off the soccer field for instigating fights with players on the other teams. That mean streak made Lydia nervous sometimes, but she told herself he was all talk, harmless, a showboat. And besides, no one could make her laugh as hard as he could. She experienced that laughter as a kind of exorcism. It quieted the voices of the girls at school who whispered behind her back and drowned out her mother’s tipsy rants, and for a brief spell there was nothing but heaving lungs, pounding heart, and tears running down her cheeks.
    She laughed with Earl for a while before they got marriedand not much after. After high school Earl went to work with his brothers on the maintenance crew at Harkness and joined the volunteer fire department. Within a few months, he stopped coming home for dinner. He’d go straight from work to the firehouse or to the Tap, where he’d eat beef jerky and potato chips. He’d come in after ten, drunk and cranky about something or someone. He’d pinch Lydia’s ass and tell her to lay off the snacks. And soon he just called her Snacks. First at home and then in front of his family. His father thought it was funny. Toughen up, girl, he said to her at Christmas dinner that first year, you know how he is . And then there were the nights, in the beginning once every six weeks or two months, and then later every weekend, when he’d come home smashed and wake her up, speaking gibberish. Whether she responded or not, sat up in bed or curled into her pillow pretending to sleep, the result was the same. A hard blow either to the side of her head or her body. Usually, it was just one. Two at the most. And sometimes afterward he would grab her by the shoulders and shake her violently. Mostly it would be dark, so she wouldn’t see him, but the few times he turned on a light or the moon outside would brighten the room enough, she would see a face so tortured and far away it was as if he were possessed, like some kind of zombie demon. She knew by then that the only thing capable of driving a demon away was another one; so when she recognized something that could drive Earl and most likely the rest of the town away, she didn’t hesitate. Thattheir demon would be her son was the awful consequence, but she didn’t think she had a choice. Which was not how other people saw it, certainly not her mother or Connie Morey, who is long dead and whose number is still, like some threat from the underworld, carved into the wood next to Lydia’s phone.
    She’s turned the ringer down as low as it goes, but she still jumps every time it rings. Ever since the morning when she got the phone call from Betty Chandler. He’s done it now, Lydia, is what she said, clipped and cold and distant as if she were reporting that the high school football team was on a losing streak. You need to get over to June Reid’s house right away, she added before hanging up. Betty Chandler and Lydia grew up together, went to the same kindergarten, elementary, and high school. They were even best friends one summer and fall when they were twelve—making barrettes with pink and blue ribbons and selling them for a dollar each—but when Betty’s chubby older brother, Chip, tried to kiss Lydia, unsuccessfully, after the eighth-grade dance and then told people she let him go to third base, Betty turned on her and spread rumors that she was loose. Just like that, based on so very little, she became her enemy and managed to stay so for more than thirty years. Later, when Luke was born and Earl had thrown Lydia out, her mother said she’d heard Betty telling people she’d been accepting money to have sex with the migrant workers at Morgan Farm across