Crawlers Read Free

you, Mom!” But Adair was grinning as she skillfully flicked the ball away from her mom’s hand.
    “What you got going on?” Cal asked, looking over the gear spread out on the worktable beside the driveway. “That filter still choking up?”
    “It needs to be replaced. I’ve got a contract for next weekend— sunk cabin cruiser. It’s only forty feet of water so they figure it might be worth it to raise her. Hull’s tight, so . . .”
    Adair paused, glancing at her brother.
    “A contract?” Cal looked at his dad hopefully—then looked away, hiding again. That’s how it seemed to Adair.
    She passed the ball to her mom, who went to the imaginary free throw line to practice.
    Dad had probably figured out what Cal was thinking. But Dad was in a good mood. He hadn’t been drinking for a good while; he’d been taking his antidepressants. And he was over being mad: Cal had gotten puking drunk one night, a few months earlier—and next day, hungover, he ran their boat aground on a sandbar. They’d had to be towed off, which cost money, and Dad had said Cal was too irresponsible to work with. Maybe Dad’s own drinking issues made him come down hard on Cal.
    Cal hadn’t done any binge-drinking since, that Adair knew of. He acted as if what Dad thought didn’t matter to him. But she knew it mattered, big-time.
    Blowing into the filter, Dad said, “You going to help me out, Cal? I’ll give you eight bucks an hour, best I can do.”
    “Oh, God, Nick, you shouldn’t have to pay him,” Mom said, pausing with the ball in her hands. Catching her breath. These days, she was mostly a coach and not so much an athlete. “He lives with us. We feed him.” She shot the ball, missed. Adair caught the rebound.
    “Hey, he’s old enough to be drafted, he’s old enough to be paid,” Dad said.
    Adair bounced the basketball to her mom, watched her take a shot, and felt, for a moment, that maybe everything was going to be all right. She knew Mom was unhappy with her, though she’d never said so. Mom not liking Adair’s computer-art obsession, her interest in sharing art files over the Internet—like she thought Adair was secretly dealing in porn, or something. She’d felt like her mom wanted her to be more into feminism and athletics. Or become a teacher. Yeah, like her.
    Zilch interest from Adair in teaching, and Mom had given out a faint but perpetual air of disappointment, until yesterday—when Mom’d seen her artwork in the digital-art show at the Youth Center. It was the best stuff there, and Mom had been proud. And today they were having fun together on Mom’s turf.
    Cal and Dad were getting back together, and Dad was talking, and working, not in that black funk he’d been in for so long, when he’d been secretly drinking and plunking his guitar alone on his boat at two in the morning.
    And she’d met a cool guy, Waylon, at school. He was a year ahead of her, a junior. He’d asked for her screen name so he could instant-message her, and they’d talked late last night on-line. Today was sunny, and birds were singing, and Mom was throwing her the ball again and smiling, and Dad was laughing at some story Cal was telling about what a spaced-out knucklehead his cousin Mason was.
    And it was funny how things came together and came apart and came together again, in pulses, in patterns. But then, didn’t that mean that things would have to come apart again?
    Or maybe something else was coming. Something new.
    And for some reason, as she paused to take her free throw, she found herself staring at the sky.
    November 19
    On the night the light screamed in the sky, Adair was walking with Waylon Kulick, the two of them looking at the television shine in picture windows. Two teenagers looking for something to do on an unseasonably warm evening.
    But if you didn’t have a car, and you lived where the mass transit was lame, you were stuck between the suburbs and the horse ranches, making it up as you went.
    “What I like