the talk-funny girl by roland merullo - excerpt
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the authors imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2011 by Roland Merullo
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
crownand the Crown colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Merullo, Roland.
Talk funny girl : a novel / Roland Merullo.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Self-realization in womenFiction. I. Title
PS3563.E748T35 2011
813'.54dc22 2011003328
ISBN 978-0-307-45292-4
eISBN 978-0-307-45294-8
printed in the united states of america
Book design by Donna Sinisgalli
Title page photography by Emily Lahteine
Jacket design by Nupoor Gordon
Jacket photography Ocean/Corbis
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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P r o l o g u e
Iam a grown woman now, married and rais-ing children, and happy enough most of thetime. Underneath that happiness, though, showing its face every now
and again, is a part of me still connected to a time when I was a girl
living with her parents in the New Hampshire hills. That girl was not
treated well, and when anyone is hurt like thatespecially a child
the hurt burrows down inside and makes a kind of museum there, with
images of the bad times displayed on every wall. Some people try to
forget the museum exists and keep their mind occupied with drink or
drugs or food, or by staying busy with work, or they chase one kind of
excitement after another, while the memories fester there in the dark.
I understand all that, and I dont lay a judgment, as we used to say,
over any of it. Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting
others, or for soaking in self-pity, or for a sharp anger that knifes up
through the surface whenever something reminds them of what hap-
pened long ago. Some people spend their lives trying never to do what
was done to them.
I have all those impulses in meanger and self-pity, the urge to
hide, and, sometimes, the urge to hurt. But there is a stronger, warmer
part of me and some courage and kindness too and a stubbornness
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2 Roland Meru l lo
a loving husband and to have children with him, but even when the
people close to you are caring and good, there are going to be times
when they say or do something that throws open the museum doors,pushes you in there, forces you to look.
My children are eleven and eight now, their lives different in so
many ways from the life I knew at that age. I had fear instead of dreams.
I was so much tougher than they are, and paid such a high price for that
toughness. Enormous as it was, I couldnt have found the anger inside
me with a flashlight and magnifying glass, but their anger is right there
on the surface and they knowsometimes too wellhow to express
it. There have been times when things theyve done or said, or forgot-
ten to do or say, have flung me back into the pastit happens to every
parent, I thinkand I reacted in ways they were confused or hurt by,
ways Im not proud of. Sometimes this has happened with my husband,
too, a man who wrestles with his own demons. If I could close down
the museum for good, or rip the pictures off the walls and burn them
in some kind of healing ceremony, I would do that. But something my
husband showed me a long time ago has given me a method of wearing
away at the foundations of the trouble, little by little, year after year, the
way water erodes stone. As part of my own healing, I decided, not long
ago, to open the doors and windows of the museum and let the light in.
I returned to the place I was raised, only twenty miles from where we
live now, and I walked the roads and went into the buildings, and talked
to some of the people I recognized and who remembered me. Moms
own private history project, the kids called it, but, of course, they
had no idea what I was really doing. It was more than a history project
and had nothing to do with nostalgia. It was my way of trying to stand
up to the worst memories, eye to eye, so that they wouldnt send their
poisons, through me, into my children.
The events Im going to describe here happened more than twenty
years ago. I was a different person then, the demons so much larger in
ld Whil I d t t d t b ti tl I
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The Talk -Funny G i r l 3
the main stream of society, I really did talk that way, and the people
around me really did behave that way. Though the pain of my upbring-
ing made me stronger, I cant say Im grateful, and I would never wishanything like it for any other child on this earth. At the same time I
dont let myself feel much self-pity. Hard things happen to people
thats the nature of the worldand, horrible as that can be, I believe
there has to be some purpose behind it all. The question isnt Why did
this happen to me? but What do I do with it? The past shouts at you,
the ugly words or actions echo down across the years. Youre walk-
ing through the museum with headphones on, listening to all that, your
children and husband nearby, the world asking you to grow up, clean
up, straighten out, pass on something good. What do you do?
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O n e
There are a lot of places I could begin thestory, and a lot of ways I could change afew details and make it easier to read. But Im after the truth herethe
truth is what heals youso Ill just begin where it seems right, on my
seventeenth birthday, and tell the story as it sits in my memory.
On the day I turned seventeen I went looking for a job. I was close
to finishing tenth grade then, a year behind where I should have been.
Classes let out just before lunch that day. I remember pretending to
myself it was in honor of my birthday, but it must have been for a
teachers meeting or a conference or something like that. I remember it
was warm for April in middle-north New Hampshire and that I stepped
out the schools front door into sunlight and saw the buses lined up in
the driveway, engines grumbling, yellow fenders marked with mud. I
should have just walked into town, but I needed time to get ready for
what I had to do, and so I stepped onto my bus with the other kids, sat
with my friend Cindy, and rode all the way back to the corner of Wal-
drup Road, near where my parents and I lived. Because I didnt want
to go home first, I hid my backpack in the trees there, tried to gather up
some courage, and then set off on foot back toward town along high-
way 112
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6 Roland Meru l lo
country highway was swollen with snowmelt, and the leaves from the
previous fall were matted and damp on the road shoulder. I went along
in my hand-me-down pants and sweater and tied-back chestnut-brownhair and made a promise to myself that I wouldnt go home without
having found a job. The night beforeit was their way of acknowl-
edging my birthdaymy parents told me I had to get what they re-
ferred to as full-pay work. Id worked part-pay for as long as I
could remember: mothers helper and babysitter for other families that
belonged to Pastor Schects church, and then cleaning the grease racks
and sweeping the floor at Emilys Dough Nuts until the chain doughnut
shop came to the town and sent Emilys out of business. All the money
from those jobs went to my parents, who did not work for either full
or part pay. My mother bought the food and cooked. My father cut our
stove wood, fished the stream behind our house, and sometimes was
able to sell the skins of animals he trapped in the woods in late winter.
Every month he received a disability check for back troubles he didnt
suffer from. But all that together wasnt really enough for us to live on,
even the way we lived, so they told me it was time to find real work. If
I had to quit school in order to help support the family, my mother said,
I wouldnt be the first person in the world to put up a sacrifice.
The blackflies hadnt come out yetstill too cold for themand
the trees hadnt gone into bud or blossom. Set along the north side
of the road stood two small wood-frame houses. When I returned to
make that walk again, on the same date in April, those houses were still
there and had worn-out American flags flying from their front porches,
snowmobiles in the yards, one rusted car, one pickup, a bow target left
over from hunting season. Just as they had years before, lumber trucks
rumbled down out of the hills loaded with ash, pine, hemlock, and oak,
and the sound echoed in the valley where the river ran. You could still
feel the hard fist of northern New England winter in the hills to either
side. I liked being outdoors, though, Ive always liked it. And, as a girl,
I j d th t lk i ll b i th h l did it
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The Talk -Funny G i r l 7
made me feel connected to the world of people, the more-or-less sane,
more-or-less normal world.
On that birthday walk into town the first place that offered anychance of work was C&P Welding. It has long been out of business
now, but in those days it was housed in a low, cement-block building
close beside the road, with a gravel lot out front. I knew I shouldnt
have, but I stopped in thereout of spite, I think, to upset my parents
and to show I wasnt afraid of the owner, Cary Patanauk, a snake of
a man. There had always been some unexplained trouble between Mr.
Patanauk and my father. Though I hadnt really met Mr. Patanauk be-
fore that day, Id seen him a few years earlier in the church we attended,
and Id heard about him often enough. I knew his nephew at school.
The Patanauk name was a kind of curse word in our house, and its
probably a mark of how foolish I was then, how nave in certain ways,
even at seventeen, how angry deep down inside, that I set foot in that
building at all.
There was an old-fashioned metal knocker on the door. In my
mind I can still see the coppery shine where peoples fingers had rubbed
away the blue-green tarnish. I lifted the knocker and let it fall. No one
answered. I waited, knocked again, thought I heard a voice, and pushed
the door open. Inside, there was a mess of gas cylinders, metal parts,
and tools, and Cary Patanauk stood at a wooden table mending what
looked like a tractor axle. The room smelled of oil and acetylene. Mr.
Patanauk closed down the blowtorch, lifted the welding mask, and
looked at me.
I come for a try for paying work, I said into the sudden silence,
because that was the way I spoke then, with a private, mixed-up gram-
mar that belonged to my father, and to his father, and to me. Even my
mother started to talk that way after shed been married to my father
for a while. My kids think Im joking when I reproduce that speech
now. No matter what I say, no matter what their father tells them, they
thi k th t t th l t I t b gg ti g
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8 Roland Meru l lo
Mr. Patanauks eyes went from my face to my chest and back to my
face again. You come for a try for paying work? he mimicked.
Yes. I could.You could what?
I looked away from him. Beside me hung a calendar, notes scrib-
bled on some of the days and, on the top half, a mostly naked woman
holding a welding torch across her middle.
You could what? Mr. Patanauk said a second time. I looked at
him and noticed that he hadnt shaved in several days. His pants were
held up with suspenders.
Any of a thing for pay.
He watched me. Your father and granddad talks of a that of a
way, too, he said in a voice as mean as smoke. There was a kind of
vapor surrounding him, a nastiness, a vulgar stink; the words seemed
to slide out of that.
I have a good liking for work.
I could give you lots of jobs, he told me after thinking about it
for a few seconds. Across the skin of his face crawled a kind of purplish
hope, or need, and it was mixed in with the sense that the world owed
him a debt. You could feel the anger in him, too, a quarter inch below the
surface. The way he used the torch seemed angry, the way he shut down
the flame, the way he stood with his arms drooping. Theres a lot of
things you could do for me, he said, out of that anger. But youd have
to not say a word about it to your crazy old man or your mother.
I couldnt not say on them.
Good money for it, you know, and you might have some fun.
I shook my head.
You wouldnt even have to talk right. You wouldnt even have to
talk at all.
I had, then, the nervous habit of bending my lips in between my
teeth and biting down on them. I did that. I shook my head. We were
t di g b bl fift f t f h th
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The Talk -Funny G i r l 9
Mr. Patanauk let his eyes run over me one more time, top to middle
and back again, then with a jerk of his head he nodded the mask down
over his face and fired up the torch, and after a few seconds I realizedthe conversation was finished and I turned and went out the door.
A quarter mile beyond the welding shop stood a brown shingledhouse with a sagging roof and a sign out front: 112 store. Its still
there, though its been fixed up now, and painted a lighter color, and
they sell, along with a few groceries, toiletries, and lottery tickets, used
CDs and movies from a table at the back. It was the place my mother
shopped when my father wouldnt drive her into town. She complained
that prices were unfair at the 112, and she made up for that by steal-
ing things in small amountsa can of baked beans, a box of tampons,
one of what she called the fold-papers she liked to read. The young
owner of the store then, Mrs. Jensen, never caught her in any of those
thefts, or maybe only pretended never to catch her, and always treated
me with a reserved country kindness. No doubt she had some idea what
went on in our family, but probably she feltas most people felt in
those parts and still dothat what happened in our house wasnt any
of her business, that it was part of life, that Id survive it the way so
many other children did. On that day she greeted me with a pleasant
voice and when I asked about work she told me things were slow just
then, money was tight all around. But I could stop back in a few months
if things seemed to have turned a little for the better. She looked at my
sweater and pants and sneakers. Are you hungry, Margie? she asked.
I have some muffins I made this morning and theyre not going to sell.
I could give you one, and some milk if you wanted.
Im for thanking you, but no today.
You sure?
I nodded, stomach empty. Todays a day for to finding work.
W ll g d l k th
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10 Roland Meru l lo
Next along the route was Warner and Sons Gravel and Stone,where Zeke Warner took my name and said they had nothing there for
seventeen-year-old girls unless they happened to know how to drive a
dump truck, but if something came up hed be sure to get in touch. Did
I have a phone number I could leave?
We arent to have one, I told him. Pastor Schect isnt liking for
us to have on a phone or the TV or to curse.
Well, the not-cursings probably a good idea. I know your aunt
Elaine. Ill contact you through her if something comes, or Ill mention
it to your father if I see him at Weedons. Okay?
I thanked him and went along.
On that afternoon I walked all the way into town and back, just
under eight miles. Fourteen or fifteen places of business I made myself
step intoArt and Pats Diner, the Sewing Shop, the chain doughnut
placeand the answer was the same in all of them. It was a bad time
for the country, especially bad where we lived. Along the Honey River,
which ran through town and fed the Connecticut, the concrete of the
bridge abutments had broken away in places, showing rusting reinforcing
rod. There were men in old clothes and dirty hats fishing from the span.
On the street corners there were knots of kids my own agesome of
them turned and looked at me as I passedsmoking cigarettes and spit-
ting, dressed dark and shabby, slanting their eyes around as if any min-
ute somebody in a car with out-of-state plates would drive up and hand
them a small package of delight. The paper mills and machine shops
industries that town had been built onwere closing, one after the next.
People were losing their houses, and a sucking quicksand of debt was
forming along the banks of the river where the factories had been. Who
was going to have extra money to pay a seventeen-year-old girl?
Even used to walking as I was, that trip exhausted me. In the cold
d sk I fo nd m b kp k b hind th b h t nd s t off on th l st
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The Talk -Funny G i r l 11
were black and the stream was loud and I had to stay near the edge
of the road where the mud wasnt deep. I saw our mailbox, tilted at a
crooked angle on its post, and then, beyond my fathers stacks of stovewood, a square of yellow light that was our kitchen window.
My mother was sitting on the counter with a bottle of cheap wine
beside her and a mug of it between her legs. The ceiling light made
shadows near her eyes. Damn better say you found something, you
Majie, she said. She and my father were the only ones who called me
by that name, MAY-gee. No one calls me that now.
My mother took a drink from the mug. I watched the muscles work
in her thin neck and her legs jiggle as if small animals inside the jeans
were trying to break free. Her hair, dark as used motor oil, had fallen
loose and hung down along the sides of her jaw. She had full lips like I
do and a straight small nose and pretty green eyes buried in the shad-
ows and in webs of wrinkles. If we had a little money and she fell into a
certain mood shed buy herself a bottle of Hammonds Ros and sit for
half a day on the counter or the couch, her shoulders hunched and her
eyes cast down, and shed drink her way through most of the bottle.
There was something methodical about the way she did it, something
brutally efficient, as if she was feeling her way back, decision by de-
cision, across an unlit landscape mined with regret. There was some-
thing quietly terrifying about her when she drank; her regret had a
murderous quality. People told me then, and have told me since then,
that my mother was very attractive as a girl and grew up in a family
that wasnt desperately poor. She had a stepsistermy aunt Elaine
seven years older, and a stepfather who worked in a hardware store
and had one wife and then another who died young. After the second
of those deathsmy grandmothersa kind of wildness broke loose
from inside my mother. Against the advice of every relative and friend,
she started riding around with the man who would become my father,
Curtis John Richards. Curtis John was known for swan-diving from
th t l dg i t fi f t i t th d li bi g i t
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12 Roland Meru l lo
bridge at night to mark his initials there in gold paint. C j R,you can
still see them. He struggled in school, and had a father who taught him
how to fight and drink and chew tobacco and not much beyond that. Hepronounced his last name as if it were French Canadianit wasnt
and that probably seemed exotic to my mother. He had a motorcycle,
which she loved, and a future painted in the bleakest of northern New
England colors, which she couldnt see. He was twenty-six. My mother
married him a day after she turned sixteen and no longer needed her
stepfathers consent. She didnt speak about it very much, but from the
one-or-two-line comments she passed down to me over the years, I un-
derstood that she liked being married, at least in the early going. In that
part of America, in those years, among the girls she called her friends,
it counted for something to be able to say the words my husband and
to show off a real gold ring. In the warm weather, she and Curtis John
liked to go riding in the hills. When it was cold, she told me, We drunk
and screwed.
Having a child had not been part of their plans, if they had any
plans, and once I was born, what little chance they had for a prosper-
ous, peaceful life seemed to evaporate like river splash on hot stone.
My mother was nineteen and a half when I came into the world. She
didnt like to get out of bed in the night to mix formula. She didnt
like people telling her to give up cigarettes. She didnt like changing
diapers, or making regular appointments with the pediatrician, or tak-
ing the stroller to a place where there were sidewalks and meandering
around with other young mothers, discussing the joys and troubles of
parenthood. She hated having to give up the motorcycle rides, and she
didnt appreciate the change in her sex life that having a baby in the
house brought on.
At the time I was born, my father had work in a small plant that
made hand tools. His parents had never lived together; his mother
died when he was ten. After that, his father, Dad Paul, raised him in
th t t b th g t ti t ght hi b t t
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The Talk -FunnyG i r l 13
the start Dad Paul liked my motherhe had a big side of him, my
father used to sayso as a grand present to mark the birth of a grand-
child he gave his son and daughter-in-law his four-room camp ontwelve acres in the woods. The camp had been used for hunting and
was not much more than a cabin, poorly insulated, cold in winter, but
out of sight of any neighbors, and the privacy suited my father. His
own fathers gift was something he mentioned, with great pride, dozens
of times over the years, even long after Dad Paul had been sent away.
We moved into the camp just before I turned one. When I was two,
my fathers place of work closed down. After a few weeks, he found,
at a lower salary, a job in another small plant where they made plas-
tic picture frames and TV remotes. And then something happened
what, exactly, Ive never been able to find out. There was some kind of
trouble, an accident or a fight. My father told me once that he d taken a
fall and hurt his back, but I dont think that was the true story. After a
long stretch of legal squabbling and a series of consultations with doc-
tors, the company let him retire on what he referred to with some pride
as part but permanent disable. In order to keep the checks coming,
he had to pretend to be physically unable to do any kind of work, so
he stayed in bed for a few weeks, carved himself a cane to use when he
went out in public, and parked in the handicapped spaces whenever he
thought he could get away with it. After the accident, though, if thats
what it was, trips to town became rare for him; except for a couple of
friends hed had enough of people by that point in his life, and he pre-
ferred to spend his time alone in the woods, coming home only to eat
dinner and sleep. Once every few weeks wed all go into town, or wed
go to the quarry for a swim on very hot days, but for the most part my
father kept himself away from other people.
Mister Warner told he might have a work to give, I said to my
mother. I set the backpack down at my feet.
She squeezed the mug between her thighs and made a drunken,
i h d f Id b f h d d f ti It
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14 Roland Meru l lo
I nodded and looked away.
Look on me in my eyes, you Majie you. . . . Might?
Probly will. Next week he could of.You lie maker. Probly dint even go.
I went.
Your dad int gonna like that mightyou said.
Where is he?
Fishin the bridge. Mightint gonna work for him today, give at
his mood, Ill lay cash money.
Hell to know I went.
Light in a ciggo for me, Majie.
I dont like to light in, Ma. Im tired. I
Light in or Ill go douse ya, no matter how big you think you are
now. I can still take you, too, Ill show you some time on that.
I dont want being doused. I dont want fighting.
She made a witchs laugh, a sound with little sparklers in it, alcohol
and smoke, a ribbon of meanness winding it up in a bow. God douses
the bad, she said. Light in one then, girl.
I went to the cupboard where she kept the carton of Primes, took
down and opened a fresh pack, tapped out a cigarette, and lit it for her,
pulling the smoke into my mouth and blowing it out as quickly as I
could. Cigarettes tasted like dirt to meI hate the smell of them even
nowlike the dust raised from cars passing on Waldrup Road at the
end of summer. My mother watched me smoke, one puff . . . two . . .
three . . . then reached out a hand that was thin and shaking and let me
pass the cigarette over to her. She kept her eyes on me while she drew
a deep drag. She held the smoke as long as she could, shot it out her
nostrils, and smiled. Pa might douse ya, though.
I dont want to being doused. Call on Mr. Warner if you cant
believe me. Call on Mr. Patanauk.
Hah. Your father would cut me on up if I even spoken the mans
F i k h i A d d t t gi th gi l
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The Talk -FunnyG i r l 15
room and lay facedown on my sagging bed. I closed my eyes and
thought, for the millionth time, about finding a way to leave. But, be-
yond a few coins in my pants pocket, I had no money. How would I runaway? Hitchhike? After what had been happening in those hills then?
I thought of Aunt Elaine, and the one time Id tried to run away, and
what happened afterward. I thought of the birthday gift shed just sent,
and was surprised and happy that my parents had let me keep it. I fell
asleep thinking about that and was awakened by my fathers knocking.
The door was open. He knocked on the casing, as he always did,
in bursts of three. Rap. Rap. Rap.Again. Again. Again. He stood there
staring and knocking until I sat up, rubbed my face, and walked over
to him. Without saying anything, he took hold of my ponytail and
marched me through the main room of the house, where the table had
been set for supper, and out the door. Full darkness had fallen by then,
but my father went across the yard without a misstep. Three douses,
three douses, he chanted quietly as he went. And then: For be the
lazy girl not to finding the job, three douses, she say.
You dont to have to, Pa. I did and tried hard.
Have to is not wanting to. God say. Your mother say. Pastor say
penance for keeping children on to the good.
When I started to speak again he tugged once, hard, on my hair.
My father was small but very strong. It made no sense to try to get
away. When we reached the stream he turned me with his hands on
my shoulders and made me stand facing the house, arms at my sides.
He took a metal bucket he kept there for that purpose, filled it three
times, and three times poured the watercold as ice at that time of
yearover my head. I forced myself not to make a sound. When it
was finished, he tapped me on the shoulder and I hurried across the
dark yard and back into the house. I shut the bathroom door, wrung
out my clothes, and took a hot showerfive minutes on the small plas-
tic timer my mother had found at the dump and my parents kept on the
b k f th t il t th I d d i th i f fl l j
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8/6/2019 The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo - Excerpt
18/19
16 Roland Meru l lo
socks. I said a prayer for forgiveness, wiped up the water on the floor,
hung my wet clothes over the shower curtain rod, and went and sat
with my mother and father for the blessing.My father hadnt had any luck fishing, so that night we had the last
of his venison sausage, canned beans, two slices each of white bread,
and lemonade made from powder. My parents talked a littleabout
money, about how high the stream might get with the melted snow. I
listened. When they told me to, I stood up and cleared the table, then
went into my room and closed the door almost all the way and did my
schoolwork. I liked the work. I remember, at that point, we were study-
ing how people in Africa lived, and I liked reading about the types of
food they ate, and the way the families would sit around a fire at night
telling stories. Mr. Anders said some of them lived in tribes, the way
the Indians had lived in America, and although they didnt have cars
and television, they spent a lot of time with their families and out in
nature and some of them had happy lives.
When Id stayed in my room as long as I thought my parents would
allow, I walked back out into the main room. I could sense they were
in a different moodwhich usually happened after theyd given me
a penance. It was the way they sat at opposite ends of the couch, my
mother, half-sober by then, reading a fold-paper, my father staring at
the floor, as if lost in a pleasant memory. They raised their eyes to me
and had nothing bad to say. I went to tell them good night. My mother
kissed me on the mouth with her smoky, winey breath. My father didnt
touch me, but he looked into my eyes and seemed to be wondering if
there was any lasting hurt from the dousing. In the lamplight I could
see a few short bristles of gray mixed into the brick-colored hairs of
his beard. He said, Tell a prayer for us and for Pastor Schect on your
knees in there now, girl.
So I went into my room and did that, ran my hands over the soft
cloth of the birthday pajamas, and in a few minutes I was asleep.
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8/6/2019 The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo - Excerpt
19/19
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