Read Online Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore - Free Book Online Page A

only wanted my body to bloom and bleed and be loved. I was raw with want, but in part it was a simple want, one made for easy satisfaction, quick drama, deep life: I wanted to go places and do things with Sils. So what if the house burned down.
    I heard her bicycle crunch up the driveway then stop. She scratched at the screen with a key, and I got up and went to the window.
    “Hi,” she smiled, looking up into the house through the rusty grid of our screens. She was wearing her best blue jeans, and her white sleeveless shirt under a jean jacket. I knew her clothes by heart.
    “Come on in the front,” I said. “The door’s unlocked.”
    “Your parents home?”
    “Ehm … just LaRoue and my mother.”
    “Brought along a little something,” she said, patting the breast pocket of her jacket. “Leave open the windows of your life, babe.” I watched her wheel her bike off to the front and waited to hear the doorbell ring. LaRoue answered.
    “Berie,” LaRoue shouted gruffly, perhaps even angrily, but why? I never asked. “It’s for you. Silsby Chaussée’s at the door.”
    “Let her in,” I shouted back.
    “You,” replied LaRoue, who pounded off to her own room.
    “Girls, stop yelling!” called my mother from upstairs.
    I met Sils halfway, in the dining room, already coming in, and I grabbed her jacket cuff, turned, and led her back into my room.
    “Typical afternoon at the Carr house,” said Sils.
    “I hate this family,” I said, and closed and locked the door. We had old doors in our house: keyholes with skeleton keys we were required to leave in the hole.
    Still, I turned the key, locked the bolt in place, and once the door was shut I watched Sils’s smile dissolve to a mumble and a stare. “Fuck,” she said, fumbling for the joint in her pocket and lighting it with Sans Souci matches. She inhaled and held the smoke deep inside, like the worst secret in the world, and then let it burst from her in a cry.
    “Here.” She thrust the joint at me and I headed for the back window with it, on my rug-burned knees before the screen, blowing out the smoke.
    “I keep thinking about what’s inside me,” Sils said. “The beginning little Tinkertoys of a kid. But I don’t feel anything.”
    I turned to look at her, but we were sitting too close, so I turned my head back toward the window, looked toward the middle distance, then farther, looked out past the trees, at and through the leaves, and I again remembered that night last year, the one with the man and the gun springing up like a jack-in-the-box, the light summer midnight just beyond and past the branches. We had run, always heading for the next group of trees, and then for the next and then the next, like an enactment of all of life.
    “I don’t know how I’m ever going to deal with all this without everyone finding out,” said Sils.
    Everything was getting funny and vague. My records in a pile on the spindle plopped down one by one: the Moody Blues; Stevie Wonder; Billie Holiday; Crosby, Stills and Nash; the Rolling Stones. Every song had the word “Tuesday” in it. “Tuesday Afternoon.” “Tuesday Heartbreak.” “Ruby Tuesday.”
Maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. Will you come see me Tuesdays and Saturdays?
    Maybe it was Thursday and Saturday. But I preferred Tuesday. A day of twos. Sometimes when I sang alone, sprawled rapturously on my bed, the windows open and the cheeping summer night outside in big warm rectangles, calling, calling, I just made the words be whatever I wanted.
    “I have something to show you,” I said, getting up and handing the joint back to her. I walked over to my record shelf and lifted up my stack of records, the dozens not yet piled on the stereo—Big Brother and the Holding Company, Melanie, Seals and Crofts, a collection of Neil Young concerts lap-recorded by a bootlegger with a cough—and showed her the money, flat and dead, priceless and chloroformed like a flock of butterflies.
    Sils