Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams

Author:Joy Williams [Williams, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307763853
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-31T20:00:00+00:00

When Liberty was twelve, Willie gave her a heart pendant for her birthday. It was a pretty little heart, thin and gold-plated.

“I was looking for a locket,” Willie said. “Something you could open up, but they were all too big. I wanted just a tiny one so you could maybe wear it all the time, so you’d hardly even know that you were wearing it.”

“I like it,” Liberty said. She was still a little frightened of him, but now she thought it was love. She clasped the necklace around her neck and kissed him.

“You don’t know how to kiss,” Liberty said.

“Sure I do,” Willie said.

Liberty giggled. “No, you don’t. You don’t kiss like that with your mouth just hanging open.”

“Well, where did you learn to kiss?”

“Travis kissed me once at school, but I’m sure I didn’t learn anything from that.” She made a face.

“Whores won’t let you kiss them. That’s why I don’t know.”

“Oh, Willie, you’ve never been to a whore.”

“One of them told me that the Devil was Jesus’ older brother. She insisted upon it.”

“You’ve never,” Liberty said.

“I might have,” Willie said. “But it’s a secret.”

“Just because you’ve told a secret doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve told something true,” Liberty said.

That night, on her birthday, Calvin took them all out to dinner. They went to Liberty’s favorite restaurant, a place called The Dollhouse. The building had once housed a loud, mean bar until, after a series of maimings and maulings, it had been shut up by the town, then bought by ladies of the Garden Club, an organization of which Doris was an active member. In the center of the restaurant was a five-foot, twenty-room, elaborately decorated dollhouse with over two thousand pieces of tiny furniture, the collective hobby of the Garden Club ladies. Doris had sewn the draperies for many of the rooms and the cabbage rose slipcovers for the chairs on the sun porch. Calvin himself had carved out a small plaque that was mounted near the front door of the dollhouse, because besides being a banker, he was a devoted fan of history. The plaque said:

On This Site

in 1865 Nothing

Happened

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