Read Online The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Hannah Pittard
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then—alone in bed, her body flat under a single white sheet—that she thought of Sissy, thought of Trey and her father and the three-story Tudor at the foot of the cul-de-sac. She didn’t miss anything so mundane as her clothing or the television set and obviously not the swimming pool. What she missed presented itself in fragments, in images, incoherent and incomplete: Her mattress. The dark of her bedroom. Her sister’s breath. The smell of her father’s cologne in the morning. Things anyone would have missed: A bark from down the street. Leaves changing color. Leaves falling. Leaves existing at all. In particular she missed (or at least recalled with a slight gasp) the faint blue illumination from the fish tank in Trey Stephens’ basement.
Outside she heard splashes of water. Without looking out the window, she knew what was there, could see it clear as day. The Mexican, belly up, floating. And the twins, also belly up, also floating, one on each side of him, holding on to an ear or a finger, maybe his neck. This was her life. This was her life and the Mexican would never leave them.
8
D anny Hatchet was a weird kid, always had been. He wore a sweatshirt all through summer, even on the hottest days. He kept it on at pool parties, like those fat kids who thought they were fooling everyone by keeping on their T-shirts at the ocean. But Danny wasn’t fat, not even a little.
He was the kid always taking pills at lunch, the kid who pulled out brown medicine bottles and a small carton of chocolate milk from his lunch box instead of a sandwich and chips. He’d line up the bottles and open them one by one, and invariably we’d drop our heads into our hands and say, “Not this again. Gimme a fucking break. Enough with the pills already.” But Danny took the pills daily, without ever taking any real notice of our remarks. First he’d drink the chocolate milk, then he’d pop in a pill, one at a time, over and over. He couldn’t even get the order right—pill first, then the milk. That’s the kind of kid he was. We asked him about that, about the order, and he said, like he was happy we had asked and even happier to be able to articulate a clear answer, “I don’t like the taste of the pills. If I drink the milk first, then the pill never touches my tongue.” He smiled when he said it, like he was proud to have completed a sentence. We shook our heads and waited for him to finish. We asked him about the chocolate milk, too, but he just grinned and took a sip. Every day with the chocolate milk. It was too much.
He picked his face during class, sometimes until it bled, and the teacher would excuse him even when he hadn’t asked to be excused. He was always saying things like, “What’d I do? I don’t get it.” And, really, he didn’t get it, you could just tell. There wasn’t the willfulness in him to be a smartass. Teachers were always shaking their heads, saying things like, “Oh Danny. Enough already.” Or, when he was apologizing for something he didn’t understand, they might say, depending on their mood, something as snide as, “Yeah, you are sorry, Mr. Hatchet. You certainly are sorry .” (Teachers were always calling us by our last names when they were mad or disappointed. Like it made it easier for them to tear us apart, break us down, if they pretended we were other adults.)
Our mothers were constantly making sure that Danny was included on weekends or summer vacations. “He doesn’t have the same advantages that we have,” they might say, trying to hide a slight gleam in their eyes. “He hasn’t been as lucky.” Words like lucky and advantages we knew, even at our young age, were upscale euphemisms for not poor , not the son of a drunk and, later, not the son of a suicidal mother .
Poor , by the way, is a relative term. The Hatchet house was as big as any of ours. They drove decent enough cars. (Remember the Nissan 300ZX his father brought home brand new during one of his many
Outside she heard splashes of water. Without looking out the window, she knew what was there, could see it clear as day. The Mexican, belly up, floating. And the twins, also belly up, also floating, one on each side of him, holding on to an ear or a finger, maybe his neck. This was her life. This was her life and the Mexican would never leave them.
8
D anny Hatchet was a weird kid, always had been. He wore a sweatshirt all through summer, even on the hottest days. He kept it on at pool parties, like those fat kids who thought they were fooling everyone by keeping on their T-shirts at the ocean. But Danny wasn’t fat, not even a little.
He was the kid always taking pills at lunch, the kid who pulled out brown medicine bottles and a small carton of chocolate milk from his lunch box instead of a sandwich and chips. He’d line up the bottles and open them one by one, and invariably we’d drop our heads into our hands and say, “Not this again. Gimme a fucking break. Enough with the pills already.” But Danny took the pills daily, without ever taking any real notice of our remarks. First he’d drink the chocolate milk, then he’d pop in a pill, one at a time, over and over. He couldn’t even get the order right—pill first, then the milk. That’s the kind of kid he was. We asked him about that, about the order, and he said, like he was happy we had asked and even happier to be able to articulate a clear answer, “I don’t like the taste of the pills. If I drink the milk first, then the pill never touches my tongue.” He smiled when he said it, like he was proud to have completed a sentence. We shook our heads and waited for him to finish. We asked him about the chocolate milk, too, but he just grinned and took a sip. Every day with the chocolate milk. It was too much.
He picked his face during class, sometimes until it bled, and the teacher would excuse him even when he hadn’t asked to be excused. He was always saying things like, “What’d I do? I don’t get it.” And, really, he didn’t get it, you could just tell. There wasn’t the willfulness in him to be a smartass. Teachers were always shaking their heads, saying things like, “Oh Danny. Enough already.” Or, when he was apologizing for something he didn’t understand, they might say, depending on their mood, something as snide as, “Yeah, you are sorry, Mr. Hatchet. You certainly are sorry .” (Teachers were always calling us by our last names when they were mad or disappointed. Like it made it easier for them to tear us apart, break us down, if they pretended we were other adults.)
Our mothers were constantly making sure that Danny was included on weekends or summer vacations. “He doesn’t have the same advantages that we have,” they might say, trying to hide a slight gleam in their eyes. “He hasn’t been as lucky.” Words like lucky and advantages we knew, even at our young age, were upscale euphemisms for not poor , not the son of a drunk and, later, not the son of a suicidal mother .
Poor , by the way, is a relative term. The Hatchet house was as big as any of ours. They drove decent enough cars. (Remember the Nissan 300ZX his father brought home brand new during one of his many
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