Up From the Blue Read Online Free Page B

when I was in the hallway he asked, “What am I supposed to do?”
    My brother stayed out of all of it, hunched over the rug in his room, where he took apart his rubber band ball, band by band. It went from a sphere the size of a cantaloupe to a hundred loose ends covering the floor.
    • • •
    There was so much the neighbors couldn’t have understood about our family by staring at our blue door from the lawn that day. They could not have known the relief I felt in hearing grown-ups in the house—even the sound of Momma crying facedown on the bed and Dad cursing as he scrubbed the different rooms, putting everything right. They couldn’t have known the comfort of sinking into bathwater for the first time in days and washing the fine clay dust from my skin, or of hearing clothes tumble in the dryer along with the scrapes of pennies that had fallen out of Phil’s pocket. Most of all, they could not have appreciated the small miracle of Momma coming to my room that night to tuck me in.
    She came in her pink terry cloth robe, carrying the beautiful cup we’d made together. It had started out as just an ordinary white mug from our cupboard, but we had glued plastic rubies to it.
    “There you go, Bear,” she whispered, handing me the steaming cup. She settled at the edge of my mattress, her face still creased from her long sleep. I chattered about baby carriages, ladybugs, and sour Kool-Aid until she closed my hands around the cup and insisted, “Taste it.”
    I sipped the warm, bitter drink, feeling the rubies with my tongue in between swallows.
    “I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying for you, okay?” And she reached for Alice in Wonderland , turning to the page where we last stopped. I was captivated with her singsong voice, how quiet it was that night. Sometimes she read the same sentence twice, and sometimes she had to pause until she’d wiped the tears from her eyes.
    I was fading, blinking, trying to will myself to stay awake,to have this time with her a little longer, but every part of me felt heavy. The cup began to slip from my hands, and when I squeezed my fingers closed to catch it, one of the rubies fell into my lap.
    Momma took the cup from me, and I picked up the ruby, saving it in my pillowcase, where I liked to tuck my hands. What the neighbors couldn’t see as I lay my head down was how Momma adored me, how she didn’t leave until I was asleep. I tasted the bitter drink in the back of my throat, and the room began to spin.

2

Bear
    A SMALL, BARELY LEGAL TRAVELING circus had pulled into our town in the middle of the night and set up in the parking lot of Ace Hardware. Dad and Momma took three-year-old Phil to this circus, where they sat on the shaky bleachers with the store to their backs and the mountains creating a backdrop for the performers.
    Sometimes when Momma told the story she left out the fight. Other times it was the focus—how Dad had seen other officers with their families sitting higher up in the bleachers, and how forcefully he’d insisted that our family join them. Despite his wishes, Momma chose a seat in the front row, where she and Phil shared a box of Cracker Jack, eating the caramel corn and throwing out the peanuts. Dad paced there in front of them, shoulders hunched, believing my mother would change her mind. His gray hair and the ten-year age difference between them was only one reason my parents were regularly mistakenfor father and daughter. The other was the way he scolded her, and the way she fought his control.
    Eventually, Dad sat down beside Phil because he was blocking someone’s view. My brother spent most of that hour and a half shrieking and flinging himself off of the bench, mad that he no longer fit on Momma’s lap because I was there, still in the womb, but already invading his space and stealing attention from him.
    Even with all of this distraction, Momma was completely absorbed in the show, which featured animals in ankle chains, standing on one