Little Bird of Heaven Read Online Free

As the game ended I limped off the court wiping my sweaty face on my T-shirt and I heard a male voice—startling, in that context—a thrilling growly undertone: “Krista.”
    At once I looked up. Looked around. A man not twenty feet away, in a fawn-colored suede jacket, dark trousers, cap pulled low over his forehead. Was he signaling to me?
    Now I heard him, more clearly: “Krista. Outside.”
    I felt weak. I could not reply. Staring after my father as he pushed through the doors to the corridor beyond, and was gone.
    Other girls had seen him, heard him. Of course. They’d sighted him—a man—Krista Diehl’s father?—before I had.
    We shuffled into the locker room together. Girls who’d been laughing loudly had quieted. Girls who felt a certain tenderness for me, or, at least, some measure of tolerance, glanced at me with expressions of curiosity, concern.
    Diehl? The one who…?
    That woman who was killed, he’s the one who…? Why’s he out of prison so soon?
    Someone—I think it was our gym teacher—was watching me. Asking me some question but I pretended not to hear. Through the excited buzzing in my ears there was little I might have heard, that I wished to hear.
    Wanting to laugh in all their faces. For what did any of them know about my father Eddy Diehl, and me? Thinking He has come for me, you can see how special I am after all.

5
    “I T’S OVER .”
    Or, “It’s finished.”
    These were my mother’s words. There was dignity in my mother’s posture—erect, not visibly tremulous, head held high and eyes unflinching—as there was dignity in the brevity of such a reply: her response to questions put to her about her (ex)-husband Eddy Diehl. For it was not to be avoided, Lucille Bauer was asked about Eddy Diehl, this now much-talked-of and “controversial” individual to whom she’d been married for eighteen years, which was most of her adult life; and when Lucille wasn’t asked in actual blunt rude pushy words she was asked by implication, indirection.
    Oh Lucille! How is it with—? And so she’d taken to replying in this brief cool but perfectly polite way, with a knife-cut of a smile that suggested hurt, or the mockery thereof.
    Want to see me cry? Want to see my broken heart? You won’t.
    In the 1980s, in Sparta, New York, the expectations of a young woman of Lucille’s class—working-class/middle-class/“respectable”/“good”—were not essentially different from the expectations of Lucille’s mother in the late 1950s and early 1960s: you yearned to be engaged young, married young, start to have your babies young. You yearned to attract the love of an attractive man, possibly even a sexy man, certainly a man who made a good living, a man who was faithful.
    In the late 1960s, elsewhere in the country, or, at least, in the tabloid America fantasized, packaged and sold by the commercial media, therehad been a sexual revolution: a hippie take-over. But not in Sparta, and not in Herkimer County. Not in upstate New York in this glacier-raddled region in the southern foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. Here, despite a rising divorce rate, more “single-parent” homes (i.e., Negro mothers on welfare, much talked-of, disapproved-of ), and other unmistakable incursions of the 1960s fallout, the America of the 1950s yet prevailed, beneath a showy veneer like the faux yellow pine hardwood floors my father’s construction company sold, since prospective homeowners didn’t want to pay for the real thing.
    Not publicly but to her family, repeatedly and dazedly my mother would say—not quite within my hearing, but I managed to hear—that she’d never known Eddy: she’d lived with a man for all those years, she’d had two children with him and she’d never known his heart.
    (Was this so? Neither Ben nor I had any idea. Photographs of our young parents showed two strikingly attractive individuals: a very pretty round-faced girl with a cheerleader-smile, glamorous teased hair and a