Malus Domestica Read Free Page B

against God. And in this house, God’s rules come before man’s now. We’ve been over this.”
    “Yes, Mama.”
    “You’re more than welcome to read your Harry Potter book, but I won’t have any talk about magic. Okay? A book is just a book. It’s not real.”
    Robin sucked on her lip for a moment. She summoned a little courage and asked, “If magic isn’t real, why does God not want it in our house?”
    Annie gave her that exasperated don’t-be-a-dummy scowl from under her eyebrows. “I didn’t say magic wasn’t real. I was saying that Harry Potter isn’t real. You can read them as long as you understand the difference between reality and fiction. Harry does ‘good magic’, and that’s okay—he’s a good little boy—but in real life, good magic doesn’t exist. In real life, honey, all magic is bad.”
    The little girl sighed. “Yes, Mama.”
    Tick. Tick. Tick. The clock on the kitchen wall chiseled away at the morning. The short hand and the long hand were racing each other around the dial as though reality were in fast forward. The numbers were unintelligible sigils.
    Annie had finished her coffee by the time she spoke up again, cutting through the droning of the lawnmower. “Hurry up and finish, and we’ll go down to the bookstore in town. You can pick something out.”
    After breakfast, they went out the back door, marching down the little wooden stoop. Their back yard was huge, occupied by a stunted oak tree and a lonely gray shed fringed with ragged weeds. A board swing twisted and wobbled in the breeze. In the distance, out by the treeline, Robin’s father Andy Martine bumped and roared along on his gas-stinking Briggs and Stratton.
    “We’ll go tell Andy we’re going to town,” said Annie, referring to Daddy by the secret identity all superhero Daddies had. She started off across the grass. “Don’t want him to come in and find us gone without telling him where we went.” You know how he can get.
    Robin clutched Mr. Nosy to her side, the Muppet mosquito flopping around with every step.
    Daddy was apparently doing a bad job at cutting the lawn, because there were long thin tiger stripes of unmowed grass every ten or twenty feet. Annie walked through them, kicking up drifts of chewed-up lawn that looked like canned spinach. Robin plowed through it, making soft explosion noises with her mouth as she went.
    “You shouldn’t strew the grass around like that,” said Mr. Nosy. “You know he doesn’t like it.”
    Robin’s heart lurched. “Oh, right.” She laid the mosquito on top of her head like a hat, so he could see better. “Buzz buzz buzz.” His soft legs flopped against her face like blue dreadlocks.
    The back yard was so big. Why was it so big? It seemed like the farther they walked, the bigger it got. The sun bounced up off the dry, prickly grass with a hard, walloping heat, and the tufts of lawn got taller and thicker until they were wading through a thicket of crabgrass, clover, and wild onions.
    “Hold on, Mama,” Robin said, stopping to search the ground, “I want to find a four leaf clover.”
    Annie stopped, took a knee, and swept her hand like a beachcomber with a metal detector. Easy as pie, she plucked a lucky four leaf and held it up for her daughter to count the leaves.
    It never failed to amaze Robin that while she could wander the yard for hours stooped over like an old woman and never see a single one, her mother never seemed to have any trouble finding them. “You’re so lucky. But you’re not as lucky as me.” She inserted the clover’s stem behind Robin’s ear so that it flowered against her temple like a hibiscus in a hula girl’s hair. “You’re not as lucky as me, because I have you.” Annie grinned. Instead of their usual eggshell white, her teeth were made of wood, brown and swirly dark. “I’m the luckiest mommy in the world, you know that?”
    Robin stared at her mother in horror. “Why is your teeth made of wood, Mama?”
    “What?”