Read The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt for Free Online Page B

even know what he thought about. She wondered if he ever thought of . . . Minna’s eyes blew open. Just like my mother, she thought, shocked. I am thinking just like my mother. It is catching!
    â€œHappy music or sad?” repeated Willie.
    Willie played a few notes, wandering across the strings. Lucas pulled on Minna’s sleeve, gesturing to his pocket. The frogs. Minna had forgotten.
    â€œHappy,” she told Willie. “Happy!” she called, walking backward as Lucas pulled her toward the pond. Someone stopped to pat the brown dog. Minna and Lucas waved good-bye to Willie, who raised his eyebrows good-bye back to them. And then he lifted his bow with a great flourish and played an arpeggio so bright that it seemed to call out the sun to follow them down the street and away.

SEVEN
    S pring appears violently, rain and sun and rain again. The earth is muddy and Minna’s mother, wearing heels, sinks into the front lawn as she walks to the car. Minna practices. She practices on and on. She practices so much, so often, that her mother stops writing to listen. Her father comes out of his study to stand at her door. He carries a textbook on adolescent behavior. McGrew hums and smiles and begins spring baseball.
    Minna’s mother had gone to the dentist. Minna walked into her mother’s writing room. Her mother had begun to clean but had stopped midway, leaving behind a strange combination of chaos and order. In the typewriter was a page, a page numbered 1 with two typed sentences, double spaced. It was, Minna knew, a book beginning. She sat down and read.
    Leila fell in love at noon. The boy was tall and slim and distracted.
    Minna frowned. “Distracted.” Did that mean grand looking and nearly perfectly organized? With a vibrato? With corn-colored hair?
    Minna looked it up in the dictionary.
    Distraction: 1. A distracting, or state of being distracted; perplexity, confusion, disorder.
    Not Lucas, thought Minna. Her mother, maybe, but not Lucas.
    2. Agitation from violent emotions; hence, mental derangement; madness.
    Her mother. Definitely her mother. Minna leaned back and read the signs above her mother’s desk. The old ones were there, the confusing ones. Minna leaned forward. There were two new ones.
    THE WRITER WRITES ABOUT THE WRITER
    ALL SERIOUS DARING COMES FROM WITHIN
    â€”EUDORA WELTY
    The writer. Her mother? Minna read the two new sentences in her mother’s typewriter again. She thought of her mother falling in love at noon. She closed her eyes, trying to picture the scene, her mother young, in shorts and braids, falling in love in the midday heat. Her father, sweating, leaning on his bicycle, both of them confused and perplexed. As hard as Minna tried, all she could see was her mother’s room, half clean, her father in a suit, tripping over books, all of them, the lot, in danger of falling into distraction. Minna sighed, opening her eyes. There, almost magically, as if she were seeing clearly for the first time, were two matching red-striped socks, hanging over the side of the clothes basket. She gathered them up, rolling them into a tight neat ball.
    â€œAre my glasses here?”
    Minna’s father stood in the doorway.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” he asked.
    â€œSorting socks,” said Minna, looking around for his glasses. His glasses were “eternally lost,” as her mother put it. McGrew had once drawn a picture of their father looking for them, a line drawing of a man with a candle in the night, bare feet, a nightshirt, and a lost expression.
    â€œSorting socks to keep from becoming distracted,” Minna added.
    Her father bent over the clothes basket and came up with a black case. He grinned at her.
    â€œAh, distraction,” said her father, putting on his glasses. They were half glasses, ones he could look over or through at her. “You mean like messy rooms? And lost glasses?”
    â€œIs it a disease?” asked