Long Time Gone

Начало книги

By standing on the tips of her toes on a kitchen chair, five-year-old Bonnie could just see out over the sill of the window in the tiny daylight basement apartment where she lived with her parents. The sun had finally burned through the low gray clouds, and now splashes of sunlight cast a crazy-quilt pattern across the rain-dampened grass of the yard and the cracked concrete of the crumbling sidewalk and driveway. Sunlit spring afternoons were rare in western Washington, and Bonnie longed to be outside, but she didn’t dare, not with Mama and Daddy gone.

When they went away on those long Saturday afternoons, they’d tell her that she’d better stay inside and be good until they got home, or else…Bonnie knew what “or else” meant. If they found Bonnie had been outside while they were off drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, Daddy would take off his belt and light into her. Or Mama would go outside and cut a switch from the weeping willow tree and use that on Bonnie’s bare legs or the thin, raggedy panties that covered her equally thin behind.

Читать дальше →