November Mourns Read Free Page A

back like he’d slapped her. “What?”
    “Tush always stole books and tore them up, flushed them down the john. He hated them because he was illiterate, like everybody in his family, and he lashed out.”
    “That sounds familiar,” she said.
    Half the county did the same thing. Kept their kids home from school because they thought it was a waste of time. Put them to work on the farm or hauling moon by the time they were eleven or twelve. The best runners were about fourteen years old—young, stupid, and juiced with immortality. Almost everybody had a relation who had died before hitting sixteen. Rolling over down an embankment, broadsiding a semi, head-on into a tree and rupturing the gas tank.
    Burning moonshine, if it was the good stuff, couldn’t be put out. The flames just kept going for hour after hour. Scorch marks and rusted, burned-out GTO husks littered the hogback paths of the hollow.
    “So I taught Tushie to read. Prison libraries have an extensive catalogue of children’s literature. The Dick and Jane, A is for Apple type of stuff; and the middle-grade books. He picked it up quick, quit trashing my stuff and we started hanging out together a little, talking about the stories. Got to be okay pals.”
    Night swarmed around them, alive and malleable. Water lapped across the flat stones and grumbled in the weeds. There were still people who brought their cats down to these rocks in croker sacks and drowned them in the shallows. Elfie shuddered against him and it reminded him of where he was. A cloud of her breath burst against his chest.
    She looked into his eyes and he stared back, thinking of how he’d first beaten the hell out of Tush Kline. The guards had urged it on for a few minutes before stopping him. He remembered the troubled looks he’d gotten from other cons in the library later on, making Tush practice his alphabet, the guy’s tongue prodding the corner of his mouth as he struggled to spell out Dog. Money. Gun.
    Elf had her lips slightly parted, perhaps welcoming a kiss or just feeling him out, see what he’d do next. Shad wasn’t certain they’d ever actually been in love, though they’d come pretty close. Maybe they’d been on their way to some kind of happiness, as much as anyone could hope for in the hollow, before she’d become pregnant. It had shocked them both but also infused them with a tenuous sense of joy. Something to look forward to, a new significance that might count for more than they’d believed.
    Shad had walked around for about a week wearing a stunned smile, and by the time he’d finally come to fully accept the situation, that he was actually going to be a daddy, she’d miscarried.
    Elfie had cried for three days straight until her electrolyte balance was shot. He had to force-feed her salty soup and clean up the constant vomit. Her mama stared out the kitchen window at the trailer but only came over to read the Bible, pray, and order things off the late-night shopping channel without her husband knowing. Painless Nostril Hair Waxer. Anti-snoring Throat Lubricant with Uninterrupted Airflow Pillow. A four-gallon tub of Dissolve’a’Grit.
    Elf spent another week mostly unresponsive and staring through the ceiling. He’d heard about this sort of thing before but watching her lying there inert and totally silent, only her lips moving a little, scared the shit out of him. Even more so because when she wasn’t holding herself responsible for the baby, he knew she was blaming him and hating him to death.
    One morning she came back a little and started dressing herself again. She cleaned the trailer constantly, dusting the high corners. Prying up the floorboards with a spackle blade, really smearing on her mother’s Dissolve’a’Grit. You didn’t have to be Freud to figure it out.
    Eventually she became herself again, never mentioned the baby, and acted as if none of it had happened. Shad played along. They continued seeing each other until he took his fall, but