Read Online With by Donald Harington - Free Book Online Page B

imagined her. Or maybe it was her ghost. Yeah, probably she’d been eaten by a coyote or a bear off in the woods and her ghost was here to keep him company. But just in case it was her, he opened one of the bags of Purina Dog Chow, filled a new plastic dish he’d bought in the pet aisle of a supermarket, and set it out for her.
    Then he hiked back to the pickup, and drove to Harrison. He checked the gas gauge and noted it was getting low. He didn’t need a full tank. He needed just enough to make this trip to Harrison, then one more trip to Stay More for the yard sale and one last trip to Harrison to pick up his truelove.

Chapter six
     
    I f you stare and stare at a mirror, and not because you’re getting dressed or fixing your hair, does it mean that you’re vain? She liked to just look at herself and try to imagine what she’d look like when she was eighteen or twenty. If she wasn’t badly mistaken, she would be a dish, which is what her grandfather often called her. Grandpa Spurlock liked to say to her, “Honey, you’re going to break hearts all over the place.” She’d had explained to her what he meant when he called her a bombshell, and she knew what he meant when he called her “cutie pie” and “turtledove” and “chickabiddy” but she had trouble understanding what he meant when he called her “jailbait” and especially when he called her a “killer,” because she couldn’t be blamed if somebody’s heart broke over her and they died. She would never deliberately kill anybody, although actually she might kill Jimmy Chaney if he didn’t back off. Today at school during that horrible thunderstorm he got very flirty with her and even talked nasty. Thunder petrified her, and Miss Moore had stopped teaching the class and allowed them to take cover in the cloakroom, and Jimmy had snuggled up beside her. He said he was going to crash the birthday party and sleep with her. Jimmy was really the only boy she liked, usually, but he was ill-behaved and unpleasant, the same as all boys are. And possibly he had a wicked mind. She would never forget the time last fall when he’d come over to her house after school, breaking the strict rule that she was never allowed any visitors—girl or boy—when her mother wasn’t there, and the fact that he wasn’t supposed to be there made her dizzy and so titillated she didn’t know what she was doing, and she probably encouraged him. He suggested that they ought to uncover their genitals and show them to each other. “Parts,” he had said, and maybe if he had used some other word she might have been willing, but the fact of the matter was that she didn’t have any parts. There was nothing there. This in itself didn’t bother her too much—she had taken shower-baths with her mother at a very early age and one time she and Becky McGraw had not only shown each other theirs but had drawn pictures of each other’s, so she knew this was a fact of the way all females were made, without parts.
    But she hadn’t wanted to compare what she didn’t have with whatever he did have. She’d never seen a part. She had heard several things it was called besides “part”—the thought of that word made her giggle at the idea that it could be replaced, like automobile parts. Becky said it was just called “thing.” Beverly knew it was properly called “doodad.” Gretchen had heard it referred to as “pecker.” Only Kelly had ever actually seen one, belonging to her father, and she said it was called “weenie” and attempted to describe it, and the two little pouches drooping from it, called, everybody knew, “nuts,” although sometimes simply “balls.” Robin had never seen a weenie and doubted that it looked anything at all like a hot-dog-type weenie, or frankfurter. Although blessed with a fabulous imagination, she had difficulty imagining what it looked like, and just out of curiosity she nearly allowed Jimmy to take down his pants. But instead she had told