A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

Author:Suzanne Berne [Berne, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 1565121651
Google: 7KklAchs8WgC
Amazon: B00DV790DM
Barnesnoble: B00DV790DM
Goodreads: 226868
Publisher: Viking
Published: 1997-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

It now strikes me as strange that in the days and nights following Boyd Ellison’s murder, I never really felt afraid. But I suppose nothing changed very much in my life that hadn’t changed already. The worst sort of crime had happened in my own neighborhood, the murder of a child, someone my age, whom I even knew, and still we went to the grocery store and to doctor’s appointments; Julie and Steven still pretended to be members of British café society and they still ignored me and they still swiped gum from the drugstore and smoked behind the rhododendrons; my mother still sat in the kitchen selling magazines over the phone; at night we still washed the dishes, dried them, and stacked them in the cupboard.

I find myself trying to imagine Boyd Ellison’s mother washing dishes after dinner, filling her sink with soapy water, staring at her reflection in a black windowpane as she scrubbed a bowl, rinsed plate after plate. The repetition would have calmed her. When she had finished the dishes, she might do them all again. I remember her as thin and tall from the single time I saw her at Halloween, thin and tall alone in a doorway, holding a dishrag in her hand, wearing a blue dress. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She looked, as I recall, something like my own mother.

My father once told me, “That whole summer I thought of you children. But for a while you didn’t seem to be my children anymore. You seemed to belong to another life that I didn’t belong to, and the life I was living seemed to be my only life. We went fishing and took long walks every day. Sometimes we ate at a diner down the street. We drove out into the country. That’s mostly what we did.”

Even during the worst times of your life, there are moments when life seems normal, and then you catch yourself wondering which kind of moments—the terrible or the normal—are the real ones. “I tried to write to you,” my father said. “But I didn’t have anything to say that I thought would make sense.”

That’s how we all seemed to feel about the murder. We didn’t have anything to say that would make much sense, so after the early shock of it, while we waited to find out who had done it, and why, we didn’t really discuss it much. Although my mother continued to read aloud news articles, and I continued to paste them in my notebook.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.