A House with No Roof by Rebecca Wilson

Author:Rebecca Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

9 • TROUBLE AND LIES

I ONCE TOLD LEE a memory I had of Dad, where he swung me up onto his shoulders. We sang all the way to the corner store, and he bought me candy, a rainbow of Pixy Stix.

Lee looked stunned. “That wasn’t Dad,” he said. “That was me.”

I was shocked—could I have misremembered? Maybe Lee did carry me, but surely my father must have carried me, too. We must have sung together, my dad and I.

When I think of my brother, I don’t think of siblings playing. We were too far apart in age for much of that. Instead, I think of his intense physicality, his consuming vibe. There is a scene in the movie Blow where cocaine-smuggling George Jung, played by Johnny Depp, goes through customs at the airport. Depp is dressed in white and wearing sunglasses, all swagger and cool. As an adult, watching Depp, I thought, That’s my brother.

I HAVE A picture of me and Lee, taken at my thirteenth birthday party, which was a costume party. I’m a flat-chested Catwoman, dressed in a black leotard, stockings, high heels with little rhinestone buckles, and long black plastic fingernails. Ruby is a busty Wonder Woman, with silver stars spray-painted across her chest. We stand on either side of Lee, with our hips cocked. He is dressed as a pimp, in a thigh-length fur coat and a maroon Super Fly hat with a long plume. His legs are bare, and he’s wearing Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals.

LEE GAVE ME a grocery bag full of pot leaves.

“It’s better that you learn about dope from me—but don’t tell Mom.”

When I called Kara to tell her, she said, “That’s just like your brother to give you leaf and keep the buds—what a cheapskate. I’ll be right over.”

We heard that baking pot made it stronger, so we made dope chocolate cookies. We crumbled in so many leaves, the cookies turned green. “Do you feel anything?” I asked after we each ate one. “Not really,” Kara said. We were too afraid to eat more.

I put the plate of cookies up on a shelf, and we went Downtown. In the morning, the plate was almost empty. Mom had eaten them in the middle of the night.

She had a terrible sweet tooth. When she was not home, I often crawled into her bed and hunted for the half a Hershey’s chocolate bar or box of black licorice stashed under her pillows. At the movies, she loved to eat Jordan almond candies and Bit-O-Honey bars. She always had a pack of Juicy Fruit or Doublemint gum, which she chewed half a stick at a time.

I knocked on her bedroom door. “Mom, are you okay?”

“Wow,” she said. “Get me a bucket.”

She spent two days in bed. I was sure she’d kick me out, but when she recovered she said, “The next time you put dope in your cookies, write me a note.”

LEE LIVED WITH his girlfriend Gloria in a cabin he built in our front yard. We christened it “The Fort.

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.