Love Child by Allegra Huston

Author:Allegra Huston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

At night, Cici and I would creep outside like criminals under cover of dark, drop a hose into the septic tank that lay underneath the lawn, and siphon the sewage over the side of the hill. “The nighttime drools,” she called them. The toilets had taken to backing up and she couldn’t afford the constant visits from Walt, the Reddi-Rooter man. Soon we had to stop, though, because of the smell, and Walt came back. In a new truck.

“Walt!” As usual, she was wearing a floaty top and a bikini bottom. Her legs were long and lean from riding, polished by the sun. “What happened to Old Red?”

Walt’s face was weathered, as if it was carved out of wood. “Well, Miz Huston, I done cut some holes in her an’ my wife ’n I’re usin’ her for an RV.”

Cici let out a screech. “Walt! You’re not!” Her toes scrunched up the grass as if she couldn’t bear the delight. She looked at me to see if I believed him.

I didn’t, and I didn’t think she did either. But she held the possibility, like some exotic feathered creature that she didn’t want to let go of just yet. Sturdy, rational me: I wanted to feel the pleasure of the forbidden like that.

Walt held it too. I wondered if that was just how long it took for his features to crack apart and rearrange themselves into a smile.

“Naw, Miz Huston,” he said at last. “I jes’ wanted to make you laugh.”

The dark days of winter and the February rains and Cici’s sunken grief were over. She sacked Ana Maria and Eduardo—I hoped, because she realized they’d lied to her about Collin and me—and Lisa moved in. She’d just broken up with the Chicksweeper, and she needed somewhere to live.

I nursed prim reservations about having blond, breathy-voiced, big-haired Lisa as a nanny, but they didn’t last long. Lisa tore down the invisible wall that the dark machinations of Ana Maria and Eduardo had built between our end of the house and Cici’s. Collin and I adored her, and best of all Cici was happy again.

“How is everything with Lisa?” Aunt Dorothy asked me when Collin and I were spending the day in her pool.

“She’s great,” I said. “Only she had to go to the doctor because she had gonorrhea.”

Aunt Dorothy’s head jerked back as if I’d poked her in the throat. She took a deep breath, arranged her face, and moved her fingers around like she was conducting an orchestra on the sly.

“I’m sure it was diarrhea,” she said in her most carefully modulated voice.

It wasn’t diarrhea. I knew perfectly well what that was, and even though I didn’t know what gonorrhea was, I knew the two weren’t the same. I’d never heard of anyone going to the doctor for diarrhea. Lisa did have a habit of mixing up her words, saying “bugular” for “burglar” and having to concentrate really hard not to say “pasghetti.” But that wasn’t it; I’d heard her and

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