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Show Motherlunge a novel 96 it. Your oldest daughter is weird, remote, and repetitive like the sound of a nearby icecream truck that never turns down your street. He didn't want to know, and I didn't either. What did I want? I wanted Pavia to stop screwing around and pull it together. I decided that Coach Kessler, quoted in the newspaper in the sports section in front of me on the table, said it best: we needed someone to step up and play that position. I watched my father smash out the cigarette in the ashtray with his thumb, spit out a few flakes of tobacco that had stuck to his tongue, and fill in 26 and 27 across. I watched the last threads of smoke unravel toward the ceiling and disappear. "It's strange," I said, "Sometimes it's hard to remember that you ever lived with Dorothy, or with me and Pavia." "That's why we have written records," said my father, the librarian. He ticked off another crossword clue without looking up. "You still keeping a diary?" "Not a diary," I said, irritated. Diaries always say MY DIARY on the cover. They have gold-edged pages and cardboard straps and cheap locks with two tiny keys. Diaries are quaint as chastity belts, strictly for girls. "A journal. And no, I don't," I lied. "Damn," Walter said. He sighed and leaned back, looked at me with his green eye and his brown eye. "What's a seven-letter word for peculiar speech?" |