Read Online Falling Under by Danielle Younge-Ullman - Free Book Online

lying. If you say she’s doing well, it makes him jealous, bit- ter, sends him down. Because the battle rages on still. Under the thin crust of civility is all kinds of bad shit. Mom baits Dad with her vocabulary, her education, and her success. Somehow everything she achieves takes something from Dad—she knows it, he knows it, she rubs it in.
    Dad strikes back with his puppy-dog eyes, his handsome smile, the carefree pose. And he hurts her with you—with the fact that you love him. Why he uses this, how he knows it works, is a mystery, but it makes her crazy. As if your love is a possession, a weapon, a reproach.
    Your mom doesn’t want you to love your dad. He rubs it in that you do. Their war continues past the marriage, past the divorce, past any logic that you can see. And you hang out in no-man’s-land, your white flag tattered and shot through.
    You ignore Dad’s question and decide to paint a beach.
    By Sunday morning, there is blue sky, the sun, waves lapping at the shoreline and pale, pale sand. It’s not bad, but you decide to add Dad, or a hint of him, to the scene.
    “Dad?” you call out.
    “Yeah?” he replies from the kitchen where he’s helping Bernadette with the trim.
    “Come in here, I need you to model your legs.”
    He laughs as he comes in. “If I had a dime for every woman who—”
    “Ew, don’t say it.” “Kidding, kidding.”
    You add Dad’s legs and feet, plus the bottom of a lounge chair, low on the wall, so it looks like he’s there on the beach. As an afterthought, you add your own legs, in the chair next to his. And then... maybe some girls in bikinis? He’d love that, but no, too gross.
    You’ll call it On the Beach with Dad .
    You take a few steps back to get perspective.
    Uh oh. The beach and water look fine, but the legs on the chairs... They look like stumps in striped boxes growing out of the sand.
    Yikes. On the Beach with Severed Legs is more like it. You could add Mom’s legs in there too and call it Family of Legs .
    And then there could be the corresponding mural: The Legless .
    Family Without Legs . Ha.
    Walking on Stumps While Your Feet Relax at the Beach.
    Shiver.
    You’re getting creepy in your old age.
    “Let me see it,” Bernadette says, and comes to stand beside you.
    She tries not to, but she starts to giggle, and then it becomes a roar, and then Dad runs in and looks and laughs until he has to sit down on the floor.
    “I’m going to paint over it!” you shout over the cackles, snorts and slapping of legs.
    “Don’t you dare,” Dad says. “That thing’ll crack me up every time I look at it.”
    And that’s as good a reason to paint as any.
    6
    Bernadette comes back with you two weeks later. On the subway, you lug a large duffel bag containing the fabulous curtains you sewed together in Home Ick. They have palm trees on them.
    Dad’s not home yet, so you let yourselves in, put the cur- tains up, and admire your work.
    Then there’s a knock at the door.
    “Dad? You forget your keys?” you call out as you walk to the door.
    It’s not Dad on the other side of the door, but his landlord, Chuck.
    “Hi, Chuck, what’s up?”
    “Sorry, kid, but I saw ya comin’ in and I gotta tell ya, yer dad’s not gonna be home tonight, likely.”
    “Why not?”
    “He’s, uh . . .” He shuffles his feet and rubs a hand across his comb-over.
    “He’s what?” “He’s in jail, kid.”
    The doorframe spins, but you grab on to it.
    “Hey, nothin’ serious,” Chuck says, “just another drunken disorderly. He was causin’ a disruption.”
    Bernadette comes to stand beside you and puts a hand on your arm.
    “Where is he?” she asks.
    “I told ya, in the slammer. Since this afternoon. Look, he tried to take a p—to urinate in the damned lobby. Can’t have that kinda behavior, so I called the cops.”
    “Oh my God. Where... We have to.. .”
    “What. Station. Did they. Take. Him. To!” Bernadette says.
    Chuck tells her. She closes the door in