And When She Was Good Read Free

to McDonald’s with all sorts of people, didn’t mean anything. Money went a long way at McDonald’s. You could get a large shake and fries for what some places charged for a shake alone. Her father wouldn’t want to go someplace expensive with Barbara, because she was always trying to shake him down for money. He wasn’t treating Barbara, he was showing her how little he cared for her.
    In Barbara’s defense, she did have four kids with Hector Lewis. So even though she had a decent job and he had none, he probably should be helping her out, at least a little.
    Hector had left Barbara fifteen years ago, after impregnating nineteen-year-old Beth Harbison. Helen was born seven months later. Meghan, Barbara and Hector’s youngest, was born four months after Helen, and Helen had no trouble doing that math. “That was the last time he was ever with her,” Helen’s mother often said, as if it were something of which to be proud, that he went back to have sex with Barbara only once. “And she still won’t give him a divorce. So why should he pay her any support? A woman can’t have it both ways.”
    But someone was having it both ways, Helen realized that day outside McDonald’s. There might not have been another baby after Meghan, but there had been sex. They had probably had sex that very afternoon. Perhaps it was Hector who kept persuading Barbara not to divorce him. That way he never had to marry Beth, whom he blamed for keeping him in his own hometown, an indistinct place just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not quite a town yet too distant from anywhere else to be a suburb. “Like a wart on somebody’s asshole,” her father said.
    Helen had not told her mother about seeing her father at McDonald’s with Barbara. She wondered if he knew that. If Helen had a secret and another person found out about it, she would be extremely nice to that person. But Hector Lewis didn’t behave like most people did. “He just loves us so much,” her mother was always telling Helen. He loved them so much that he left his other family when Beth became pregnant. He loved them so much that he refused to work more than a few hours a week, and then only jobs where he was paid cash money, which he spent on himself. He loved Beth so much that he made fun of her and, on the occasional Saturday night, beat the crap out of her. “He gets frustrated he can’t do better by us, but if he got a good job, on the books, Barbara would take everything. He just loves us so much.”
    Please, Helen prayed, make him love us a little less.
    Shoot. She had left her history book in the kitchen. She couldn’t do her homework without it, but she couldn’t get it without walking through the living room again. She imagined she was invisible, hoping that would make it so. Sometimes if you acted as if something were true, it became true.
    â€œBut you better not do anything bad,” her father called out as she walked by. She was confused for a moment. She was in the middle of her homework. What could she be doing that was bad? Then she realized he was still having the one-sided conversation he had started an hour ago, about her nothing face. Having suggested that she had the perfect look for a criminal, he was now outraged that she might become one, which she had no intention of doing. Helen wanted to be a nurse. Actually, she wanted to be a history professor, but she understood that wouldn’t be allowed, that it would take too much time in school with no guarantee of a job. A nurse could always find work. Her mother was an RN, and her pay supported the household.
    â€œI won’t,” Helen promised, hoping it was the right thing to say.
    â€œYou better not,” he said, his voice rising as if she had disagreed with him. She wondered if she should try to get out of the house until her mother came home. It was five o’clock on a winter Thursday, too dark