The Shore by Sara Taylor

Author:Sara Taylor [Taylor, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2015-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

1981

SOMETIMES IT HURTS

I found them half-naked in the forsythia bushes the spring after Mom died, a guy I didn’t know on top of my sister Mo, with his big, loose mouth all over her neck. Was expecting to find a rabbit, from the noise I’d heard. At first I thought he was hurting her; her face was all twisted up in a grimace, and the way she was laying couldn’t have been comfortable. Didn’t even think, just hauled him up by the collar and whaled away at him, his jeans all bunched up around his ankles and his skinny white legs trying to kick out at me in spite of them. Mo didn’t make a noise, just fumbled her skirt back down and her shirt back up and stayed right in that spot where the heat and weight of them had pressed the grass down.

After I finished with him I threw him toward the driveway, and he stumbled a few feet before he went over in the grass.

“You stay the fuck away from my sister, you fucking degenerate!” He curled up like he expected me to kick him, started blubbering but the only word I caught was “sir” repeated over and over. I realized then that he wasn’t anything but a stupid little kid playing at being grown up the only way he knew how, but even if he hadn’t meant to hurt her didn’t mean that he hadn’t managed to. When I turned around Mo shrunk down like she expected me to start whaling away on her too, but I scooped her up around the middle and hauled her back inside; she was sixteen and too old for me to be throwing her around like a little kid, but for once she didn’t fight me.

No one else was home. I plunked her down in one of the kitchen chairs, and she watched me like a cat as I dug up two of Mom’s cut-glass tumblers, threw ice into them, and nearly filled them with Dad’s whiskey. All the wheels were clicking in my head right then, but I didn’t say anything until I’d set her glass down in front of her and taken a long drink.

“What the hell were you two doing?”

It took half her glass for her to tell me that Johnny was just a sometimes thing. As was Stevo, and Roddy, and Chick, and a whole bunch of other names I’d never heard before. It didn’t really feel good in her body but it made her feel better in her head, how she was all they were thinking about for the ten or fifteen minutes they took, and most of the time the five or six days she strung them along beforehand. I just sat there, rubbing my forehead and slugging down booze, and feeling a hundred years old and more like a dad than I ever wanted to. I’d never felt that way about people, never wanted to get my bits all up in theirs

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.