Read Lost Between Houses for Free Online

another ball.
    “This chick just called me.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “The chick from my party.”
    “It wasn’t Evelyn Massey, was it?”
    “No, she didn’t come, remember? It was somebody else.”
    “God, I’d really like to go down on her.”
    “Yeah, you told me. No, this was somebody else. You remember that chick in the sparkly dress.”
    “The good-looking one?”
    “Scarlet.”
    “That her name?”
    “Yep.”
    “That’s a fucked-up name.”
    “Anyway.”
    For an older brother, Harper was sort of weirdly sensitive, and he could see I’d come out there to talk to him about the girl.
    “So she called you?” he said.
    “Yeah. Out of the blue.”
    “What’d she want?”
    “She just broke up with her boyfriend.”
    “Really?”
    “Who broke up with who?”
    I hesitated a second.
    “It was kind of mutual.”
    “That’s a good one.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “If he broke up with her and she’s on the blower in two seconds to another guy, you don’t have to be a fucking genius to figure that one out.”
    “Like she’s getting even?”
    “Or making him jealous or some such bullshit.”
    “You figure?”
    “People fall in love, they break up, they do all sorts of shitty things to each other. Remember that cunt Judy Strickland.”
    I didn’t want to talk about Judy Strickland just now.
    “She was a cunt, that girl. Somebody should’ve taken her out behind the woodshed and put her down. Right at birth.”
    “Anyway, Scarlet wanted to know when I was coming down to the city.”
    “Yeah, well don’t bet the farm on it.”
    He teed up another ball.
    “Judy Strickland. Proof positive that all human beings are
not
created equal,” he said and whacked a ball into the valley.
    “You can tell by the click,” he said. “When the club makes that kind of a click, you know it’s a beauty.”
    Just then the side door opened and the old lady came out through the garage. She had her shirt tied at her waist, like Harry Belafonte. She must have seen us gabbing from the kitchen window and she wanted to know what was cooking. I started to tell her. Harper went inside right in the middle of it, he’d already heard the story and I was sort of sorry to see him go, it was like it wasn’t interesting enough to hear a second time but once he was gone for awhile I was glad because I didn’t have to be hip about how I described it to my mother.
    A couple of days later, she went off to visit Aunt Marnie in Algonquin Park. They were old pals from high school. Must have been sometime in the ‘30s. Long time ago, anyway. Aunt Marnie wasn’t really my aunt, I just called her that; she was sort of a dumpy woman with funny black glasses and this wild cackle. She used to make my mother laugh so hard she’d like fear for her safety, all bent over in the kitchen, red face, begging Aunt Marnie to lay off, she was killing her. Like I remember once them going on about Bobodiolous, this city somewhere in Africa, the two of them in the kitchen just crippled about it. “I think I might stop off in Bobodiolous for a week or two,” my mother would say. Or, “I don’t know. That sounds like a Bobodiolousian accent to me,” and then they’d like collapse, both ofthem, and it would just start up, that wild cackle, just the sound of it making my mother laugh even harder. God, they were demento those women, when they got together. Just demento.
    Anyway, she went off to see Aunt Marnie and she left Harper and me in charge of the house.
    “Don’t burn the place to the ground,” she said and got in her big grey Pontiac and we watched it bomb up the driveway, a big cloud of dust rising up behind it and then she whizzed around the corner and she was gone.
    That night Harper and me were going to a dance over at Hidden Valley. They were the best dances around and people used to come all the way from Barrie and Bracebridge and Parry Sound, all these kids coming to this one chalet for the dance. They brought in big bands, some