Up From the Blue Read Online Free Page A

sidewalk, one soldier after another stopped to salute him. “Evening, Colonel Harris, sir.” And he returned the salutes with such a sudden whipping motion I thought his wrist would snap.
    “Keep up, Tillie,” he’d shout now and then. “You’ve got to hustle.”
    I tried, but the trombones kept sliding my head in the direction of all those blue uniforms and white gloves.
    Phil stayed by Dad’s side as if he were on an invisible leash. He had a knack for finding pennies on the sidewalk whenever we went out, but he picked them up so quickly, he hardly lost a step.
    “Come on, Tillie.” Dad’s voice was farther away now.
    The parade music jiggled my insides, and lifted the hair up on my arms. I wanted to be the girl with the pompons tied to her shoes, jabbing a baton at the sky. I danced along behind my father, danced to the womp womping of the tuba, the wild drumming.I trotted with fancy steps, keeping my eyes on my father’s hand, held out to the side with his fingers spread apart. If I could only catch up, I knew he’d take hold.
    We drove home to the sound of Phil flipping the lid of the ashtray open and closed. Sitting in the backseat with me were paper bags filled with hamburger meat, buns, a carton of milk, and an assortment of cleaners—liquid Lysol, Brillo soap pads, and powdered Ajax with bleach. I was beginning to enjoy the tiny pain of hunger and how I could make it hurt more or less with my mind. Curled just below my window, I felt the car turn left and slow, stop and slow—the rhythm that meant we were near home. But when I raised my body to see our ladybug bush and our blue door, I saw the neighbors watching us pull into the drive.
    Dad stiffened his shoulders, stepping out of the car with the kind of posture that reminded you he was used to being in charge. He carried a grocery bag in one arm and turned my head forward with his other hand, so I would face our house. When he let go, my head swiveled right back to the neighbors, heading to their own homes now. I wondered if the little girl pushing her baby carriage thought of me—jumping at the window—even as she disappeared around the corner.
    “Go inside,” Phil said. “Go on!”
    Dad walked right over the trail of crushed potato chips on his way to the kitchen and began to bang the pots and dishes around and mop the floor, lecturing the empty room until, finally, hamburgers hissed in the frying pan.
    I waited in the living room with the dolls Momma had made—long-nosed elves, brown- and pink-skinned Raggedy Anns, their big button eyes watching the closed bedroom door to see if she would come out. How many days had it been sinceshe bathed and dressed and left her room smelling of gardenia lotion? How many days since I sat beside her on the couch, our legs touching, as she sewed? I remembered those times as if they were rolled into one overstuffed day: the hi-fi turned all the way up, Rod Stewart then Dusty Springfield singing. Momma would make up her own words—“Isn’t this more fun than cleaning?”—and sing them right over top of the ones playing on the albums.
    When Dad called us to the table for dinner, my eyes and throat burned from the intense cleaning he’d just given the kitchen. As he served the food, he lectured about how we ought to pick up after ourselves, how we ought to behave at school, and how I should not choke down my food, but I couldn’t make myself eat any slower.
    After we cleared the table, Dad brought a hamburger and a pile of wrinkled peas to Momma. I followed him like a shadow into the humid room, where he raised the blinds and set dinner on the bed beside her face.
    “Please,” he said. That was all.
    Without raising her head, she reached her thin hand from the sheet to take nothing but the top bun. She barely opened her mouth, straining to take a single bite, and soon she and the bun slid beneath the covers so that only her orange hair showed.
    Dad swatted me on the bottom so I’d leave the room, and