Read Online The Forms of Water by Andrea Barrett - Free Book Online

Lise and Delia had turned away from him, sped to their mother’s side and embraced her cause completely. Kitty, who wore the role of wronged wife as if she’d been born to it, hadn’t spoken to Henry in more than a month. He had hoped to find the house empty today.
    He wheeled Brendan up the flagstone walk he’d laid so carefully when the girls were young. “Does she know we’re coming?” Brendan asked.
    â€œNo,” Henry said. His heart skipped several beats. The pachysandra around the beech looked ratty and dry and the lawn was riddled with grubs. The screens still leaned against the garage where he’d left them. One wheel of Brendan’s chair caught the corner of a stone thrown up by frost, and the fact that Kitty hadn’t had the stone replaced annoyed Henry enormously. His house was falling apart already, and by the time the bank auctioned it off it was bound to look hollow, haunted, unloved. Whoever bought it would have only contempt for the man who had let this happen.
    Brendan said, “Why don’t I wait out here?”
    â€œCome in with me,” Henry pleaded. “You haven’t seen Kitty in ages.” He rang his own doorbell and then stood behind the wheelchair, hoping his uncle’s presence might neutralize Kitty’s venom.
    His dog, Bongo, yelped and yowled inside the house. His daughter opened the door, stared at him, and then said, “Grunkie,” after a moment’s poisonous silence.
    Lise had cut her hair, and within its smooth brown frame Henry saw his own face reflected. She had his bumpy nose, which looked craggy in his face but was too strong and large in hers. She had his jaw, a bit too square, and his pale blue, almost lashless eyes. It pained him that she wasn’t more attractive, and he wished that Anita, or someone like her, would take her aside and teach her how to dress and wear makeup. She was almost aggressively homely, and in her refusal to decorate herself, in her blunt manners and sensible clothes, Henry saw his own stubbornness. Delia, dainty and feminine, so much resembled Kitty that he felt he’d had no part in making her. But Lise was his, so much like him that he both rejoiced and despaired.
    Lise stared steadily at him and then slipped her eyes to Brendan’s neck brace. “What a surprise,” she said.
    â€œLise,” Henry said. “It’s good to see you.” His voice sounded false even to him and he winced as she helped Brendan over the threshold and into the house without another glance at him. Bongo hurled himself at Henry’s knees, sixty pounds of spotted mutt with a floppy pink tongue, and Henry scratched Bongo’s ears as Lise and Brendan chatted. Then Lise called, “Grunkie’s here!” as if Henry didn’t exist. Henry’s heart shrank and withered and burned.
    â€œLise,” he said again, but she looked at him scornfully and moved away. When she was a tiny, bony child, she had sometimes looked at him in just that fashion. She went to her room and hid in the back of her closet whenever he punished her, and when he went up later to coax her out, her eyes glittered so coldly that he found himself apologizing and forgetting her misdeeds. She stood at the shelves near the staircase now, slamming books into boxes. The floor was littered with them, he saw—boxes of books, of pictures, of crystal and china and clothes. He had thought Kitty still had a few weeks before she had to move.
    Kitty came out of the kitchen, wrapping a goblet in white paper and saying, “Brendan! What in the world … ?” in the low, rich radio voice she’d developed when she went to work at the PBS station. Henry could remember when her voice had sounded like anyone else’s. One afternoon, during the summer that he’d turned twenty and had been working with a construction crew, he’d looked down from the roof of a cottage on Canandaigua Lake and seen on