Up From the Blue Read Online Free

staring at the bars and stripes on his uniform, and then his nametag, which read ROY HARRIS. Finally she said, “Your daughter’s been home all day.”
    “That’s because I bit Mary Beth,” I said, helpfully, running from the front steps to greet him.
    “She says her mother is inside,” the woman continued. “But I’ve been ringing the bell for hours.”
    My favorite thing about my father’s mustache was how it hid his expression. I could look right at him and pretend he wasn’t mad. “I appreciate your concern,” he told the woman. “I’ll handle this.”
    I nodded to her because I was convinced he could handle all of this, but he placed his hand on the top of my head to stop it from moving. “Tillie, clean that mess off your face,” he said, and quickly disappeared through the garage door.
    As Phil and I followed him, I pulled off the stickers, my eyes watering when invisible hairs came with them. We stopped short of going into the house, staying there beside the trash cans.
    “What on earth is going on here?” he yelled from inside.
    “I think he’s in the kitchen,” I said.
    Phil leaned his head through the doorway, concentrating—and when we heard the bedroom door open we held our breath. For a while it was silent, and then Dad said something too quiet to hear.
    I grabbed a piece of Phil’s shirt. “Do you think—”
    “Sh.”
    Dad’s voice got louder, and finally words we could make out: “What’s wrong with you?”
    I inhaled the smell of oil stains from the cement floor.
    “Tell me,” Dad shouted, still in the bedroom. “Did you even know she stayed home from school today? Did you think to feed her? Because nothing’s making sense to me right now.”
    “She’s alive,” Phil said in practically a whisper.
    I tipped my head backward to stretch out the cramp in my throat, staring a long while at the pink insulation on the ceiling, then down the wooden walls to Phil’s sled, hanging midway, and the mower propped in the corner. What a relief, all the yelling and stomping through the house.
    “Why is there food in the living room? What’s the heat doing on?” When he headed our way again, his keys rattling, we hurried closer to the trash cans as if we hadn’t been eavesdropping. “In the car,” he told us. “We’re not going to eat frozen meat for dinner.”
    As we walked down the driveway together, our neighbors all appeared to be busy—checking an empty mailbox, coiling a garden hose, buffing the car with a sleeve.
    “Nothing to see,” Dad told the blonde, who stood at her front door as if waiting for a report. He opened the back door of the car for me.
    When we pulled off our street, Phil, who had taken Momma’s seat up front, rolled the window all the way down and turned around to see how it messed up my hair.
    I rolled down my window, hoping for the same effect, but the wind didn’t touch him. Kneeling into the breeze, I slid my mouth along the bristly strip of the window frame, tasting metal and dust. My teeth hurt whenever we drove over bumps in the road.
    If I concentrated, I could smell a hint of Momma’s gardenialotion, even though it had been a long while since she’d ridden in the car. She’d swing her orange hair back and forth to the music—she knew every song on the radio—and when the 5th Dimension or Peter Paul & Mary came on, she’d turn up the volume and I’d sing with her. The only sound when we drove with Dad was the air rushing through the open windows. Sometimes as we drove, Momma’s orange hairs still blew through the car.
    We had to park two blocks away from the commissary because the marching band had taken over the parking lot to practice for the weekend parade. “Can we go?” I asked Dad, feeling the band play the notes on my ribs. There would be flyovers and songs I knew and miniature flags for all the kids to wave. “Can we?”
    “We’ll see,” he said. A phrase I learned a long time ago meant no.
    When Dad marched down the