Free All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Page A

ex-con named Lyal
who sometimes sold a hot stereo or a shotgun from the back of his mobile home.
    One Friday
afternoon, Pinny rode the bus home with the fat girl. Their walk to the house was
colored with the green light of newly leafing trees.
    “It’s nice
out here,” Pinny told the fat girl.
    “It bites.
I’d rather live where you do.”
    Pinny
lived in “the flats,” or downtown Dunston, near a creek that ran noisily in
summer and froze over in the winter.
    “No, you
wouldn’t. The college kids hit the bars, then wander around singing and
shouting like a bunch of retards. It’s a pain,” said Pinny.
    The fat
girl breathed loudly as she walked, her thick arms swung wide with the effort
of moving her forward, and her backpack thumped and rustled with the rhythm of
her stride.
    The fat
girl’s mother was sitting on the porch with a pan and a plastic bag of green
beans. With a small knife she removed the end of each bean, threw it into the
yard, snapped the bean in two, and dropped the pieces in the pan at her feet.
She had the same yellow hair the fat girl had, but not as bright and shiny.
    She looked
at Pinny.
    “Who’s
this?” she asked.
    “A friend
from school,” said the fat girl.
    “Hello,
friend from school.”
    Pinny
watched the fat girl’s mother work her beans.
    “Go on in
and get something to eat if you want. There’s lemonade and Ding Dongs,” the fat
girl’s mother said.
    The house
smelled of fried fish and sour milk. A television set was on in another room
playing what sounded like a game show. The fat girl dropped her backpack on the
kitchen floor, helped herself to the contents of the white cardboard box on the
counter, then went to the refrigerator and drank lemonade right from the
pitcher. Pinny put her backpack in the corner by the door they’d come in
through. In another corner was a playpen, and in the playpen the fat girl’s
little brother was moving a red plastic train back and forth on bright green
wheels. His yellow hair was cut so short it was a light fuzz on his head. There
was a pink Band-Aid stuck to his scalp that was black and sticky-looking along
its edge.
    He looked
up and wailed.
    “Stick it,
Zach,” the fat girl said. Zach kept up his wail. The mother called, “See to
him, Eunice, will you?”
    The fat
girl lifted Zach from the pen. He turned to Pinny and watched her with huge
blue eyes.
    “He’s
pretty,” said Pinny.
    “Handsome,
you mean.”
    Pinny
shrugged. Boys could be pretty just the way girls could. There was a boy in her
English class who was very pretty, small-boned and delicate. He was from India. His parents taught at the university. His skin was coffee-colored, and his hair was
black. Kids called him “faggot” and “homo,” which made no sense, because he
didn’t seem to like boys more than he liked girls. He didn’t seem to like
anyone.
    The fat
girl returned Zach to the pen, and then showed Pinny her room. It was bigger
than Pinny’s with three tall windows so dirty the sunlight was dim. On a shelf
over the bed was a row of glass dolphins. The fat girl said she loved dolphins
because they were smart and helped people. Pinny’s mother liked dolphins, too,
and had had a small golden one on a bracelet that Pinny said she’d be wearing
herself right now if her mother hadn’t taken it with her.
    “Where did
she go?” asked the fat girl.
    “A
friend’s.”
    “Why?”
    “My dad
sort of has a thing for other women.”
    “You hear
from her?”
    “Sometimes.”
    Pinny’s
mother called home once a week to update Pinny’s father on the progress she was
making with the injustice she’d suffered. Sometimes she wanted to talk to Pinny
and Pinny managed to listen and say little. Fine was her answer to every
question which made her mother say, Well, I see you haven’t broadened your
horizons much in my absence . Pinny’s mother was living in Connecticut with
her college roommate, also separated from her husband. She said they had