Becky's Kiss Read Free Page A

glass porch door shut behind her and marched to the utility room. There were tears brimming up, and she fought them. There were a million questions in her mind, but she buried them. You couldn’t talk to Dad when he was drunk, because he started making about as much sense as a square peg in a round hole.
    Tears suddenly did run down her cheeks, but it wasn’t the frustration, the fact that her father had slipped back into the bottle, the idea that she had no choice but to tell this boy she had lost his tournament shirt or some other excuse that would make her look thoughtless and stupid. It was the utility sink filled with ammonia, and the rest of the load of laundry floating in there like victims.
    She held her nose, bent closer, and of course, there were no bugs, not one, and why was she looking anyway? Clearly her father was coming up with random excuses for oddball behavior that covered up the fact that he wanted to drown out the world again.
    Becky opened the window facing the driveway for ventilation, gas-tainted from the back yard or not. There was a cardboard box on the low table by the washer, and she turned to paw through the tangle of cords and drills and hand tools that hadn’t been put up on the pegboard yet. She finally found the flashlight and, after slapping the rim a couple of times, got a spill of weak, yellow light from the thing. She played the beam into the mouth of the dryer, just to be sure. I mean, maggots were ultimately gross, and if there was a remote possibility that they had been in the machine to begin with, she wanted to do more than soak her clothes in ammonia. Can you say shopping spree?
    Bone dry, no creepy-crawlers, no hint of any kind of infestation, not even a ball of dust!
    “Where did you get it?” her father said from the archway. She started and spun with a short shriek. His eyes were still bloodshot, but they were focused. He was still holding the half empty bottle. Becky shook her hair out of her face.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The shirt.”
    “I found it.”
    “Where?”
    “By the school…I don’t know.”
    He raised the bottle up to his mouth and took a long pull, those road-mapped, bloodshot eyes never leaving hers. He finished and wiped off with the back of his beef-bull forearm.
    “It was in tatters and dirty ribbons,” he said. Then he looked off in the general direction of the back yard shed, pointing that way with the index finger of the hand holding the bottle. “It was crawling with vermin, and smelled like death.”
    “Why are you drinking again, Daddy?”
    The words hung in the air. His shoulders slumped and he looked at the floor.
    “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ll…I’ll stay in here for a while.” He pushed past to his bedroom door. “Make yourself a Stouffers or a pot pie.”
    Becky wanted to point out that frozen lasagna and microwave pot pie were lonely dinners that made you feel like a fat failure, and that her father was drinking again because his job as an expediter had been just as bad at Syracuse Tool and Fastener as it would surely be here, and he already had high blood pressure, and just because they found this house for a song, it didn’t mean that he’d ever get used to the outside salesmen complaining that he’d forgotten to add stuff onto an order, or all the customers shouting that the sleeve anchors were M.I.A., or the firesafe was past its expiration date, or the rebar hadn’t gotten there yet.
    Becky wound up saying nothing at all, just standing there for a moment looking at his bedroom door closing slowly behind him. Finally, she just gave a sigh and shuffled off to make herself some chicken noodle soup, remembering to leave a turkey sandwich in the fridge for her father. He’d grown up here, about two miles down Route 9 in one of the few poor sections of Lower Medford Township called Lewiston. Now, he’d returned to the general area, and it hadn’t been a homecoming he’d celebrated. In fact, from the