Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

hearing of it. Which was surprising, considering that throughout her treatment her mother had been nearly obsessed by the task of getting her accounts in order and taking care of what she called housekeeping. She had enlisted Mari in cataloging the paintings, for instance. She’d said that Mari’s father wouldn’t remember where they had come from, which ones were valuable and which not. She was also preoccupied by the kind of food he was feeding the cats. Mari kept bringing her back to more important matters—financial paperwork, friends she wanted to see. Yet her mother hadn’t said anything about Mari’s friend, or the fundraising page, or the money she’d given her.

Mari wondered if her gift might have had something to do with the news—her mother used to refer to herself somewhat indulgently as a cable news junkie, someone who canceled plans in order to stay home and watch Senate hearings or follow fast-breaking stories—and so much of the recent news had made that particular summer feel close again. The past looked different now, and especially the sex. It was likely they had seen it all wrong back then. Why was Bree the bad apple? The one needing to be banished? How could a girl of fourteen be the one held responsible? This wasn’t the first time such questions had occurred to Mari: she was a feminist, for heaven’s sake; she did go to college. But maybe all the zeitgeisty talk had led Mari’s mother to reconsider what had happened decades earlier, and if it wasn’t too strong a word, to repent of her part in it.

The thought was desolating. Her mother—her practical, refined, brisk, unsentimental, highly opinionated and discerning mother—was capable of experiencing a change of heart, when Mari was not. For all the years she had spent fancying herself a sensitive person, cultivating her feelings and perceptions, her heart had remained tough. Unyielding. No matter how hard she tried to view the past from an enlightened perspective, no matter how much she wanted to see it with clearer eyes, her heart kept stubbornly placing Bree as the subject of the sentence. As agent and initiator. The active, desiring, incautious subject. That was her friend, the girl she remembered. But her mother, evidently, had come to see things differently.

Bree was the one who invented the names. They evolved over time, as nicknames tend to do. First came Imogen’s—it wasn’t so far to get from Pickett to Pickle. This was probably in the seventh grade. The name suited her precisely because it was so perfectly wrong. Nothing salty or squat about Imogen, the very last person you’d expect to find inside a dark, briny barrel—which was why it must have been so satisfying to call her that. After months of being addressed almost exclusively as Pickle—your turn, Pickle; can you pass me that, Pickle; merci beaucoup, Pickle—Imogen answered one day with, “You’re welcome, Brickle”—for obvious reasons. And so Bree became Brickle, a name that eventually got shortened to Brick. Upon the introduction of Brickle, Bree made the regal decision that Mari had to have a name, too. During lunch she led them into the school library and heaved open the giant dictionary resting on its stand. She flipped through chunks, then leafed through single pages, then stopped and peered down at an entry.

“Good news!” Bree said. “Guess what it means.” Her finger inched across the page. “Mickle means ‘much, or a large amount’ as in the phrase ‘Many a little makes a mickle.’ And guess where it means that?”

Behind her glasses, her face was lit up.

“Guess.”

Imogen and Mari couldn’t guess.

“In Northern England.” She smiled at them exultantly. “Where Manchester is!” she crowed, as if Mari’s happiness was her own.

THE BURGLAR

He watches the second car back out of the driveway and then he makes a slow lap around the block, careful not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. From other houses come the sounds of dogs barking, and from other yards the noise of lawn mowers and leaf blowers. Construction is happening somewhere down the street. After completing the lap he looks up at the clock on top of the Catholic church the next block over: 9:40. He walks up the driveway purposefully and pushes through the white wooden gate, a high gate that, he noticed yesterday, doesn’t have a lock.

Ecola? Orkin? Idling at the intersection she can’t remember for a moment the name of the company she is on her way home to meet. In the past week three men came through the house, one after the other, wearing jumpsuits and slipping disposable booties over their shoes, three men on their hands and knees in the attic, creaking overhead, tapping inquisitively at the beams. After collecting all the estimates, she consulted with her husband, who had only this to say: “Trust your gut.” Oh—Greenleaf! That’s the name. They cost the most, but she liked the man and, according to the literature, they use 100-percent-organic materials.

The husband is late to work. As the elevator carries him up to the offices, he is thinking about Emmett Byron Diggs, Attica inmate #17864. Diggs will be the first innocent man to appear on the show. When the showrunner put him on the episode, he said, “I don’t want you to think that I’m asking you to write this one just because the character is black,” and he replied, “I don’t think that.” But now he is beginning to worry about what to do with Emmett Diggs.

Two thousand one hundred seventy-five dollars: This she remembers exactly. After the job is done, she will write out the entire amount and the feel of the check tearing crisply along the perforated line will be a small, silly thing that pleases her. Thank you so much! For the first time since moving into the house, she is not worrying every minute about money. She is going to the gym again. She is washing her car on