Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Ann Napolitano
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Genre: Sisters Fiction
- Price: Free
- File Size: 2 MB
- Publish Date: March 14, 2023
William
february 1960–december 1978
For the first six days of William Waters’s life, he was not an only child.
He had a three-year-old sister, a redhead named Caroline. There were silent
home movies of Caroline in which William’s father looked like he was
laughing, a sight William never saw again. His father’s face looked open,
and the tiny redhead, who pulled her dress over her face and ran in giggling
circles in one of the movies, was apparently the reason. Caroline developed
a fever and a cough while William and his mother were in the hospital after
his birth. When they came home, the little girl seemed to be on the mend,
but the cough was still bad, and when her parents went into her room to get
her one morning, they found her dead in her crib.
William’s parents never mentioned Caroline while William was growing
up. There was one photograph of her on the end table in the living room,
which William traveled to occasionally in order to convince himself that
he’d actually had a sister. The family moved to a navy-shingled house on
the other side of Newton—a suburb of Boston—and in that house, William
was an only child. His father was an accountant who worked long hours
downtown. With his daughter gone, the man’s face never opened again.
William’s mother smoked cigarettes and drank bourbon in the living room,
sometimes alone and sometimes with a female neighbor. She had a
collection of ruffled aprons that she wore while preparing meals, and she
became agitated whenever one became stained or messy.
“Maybe you shouldn’t wear the aprons while you cook,” William said
once, when his mother was red-faced and on the verge of tears over a dark
blotch of gravy on the fabric. “You could tuck a dish towel in your belt
instead, like Mrs. Kornet does.”
His mother looked at him as if he’d spoken in Greek. William said,
“Mrs. Kornet, who lives next door? Her dish towel?”
From the age of five, William would walk to the nearby park most
afternoons with a basketball, because basketball, unlike baseball or football,
was a game he could play alone. There was a neglected outdoor court that
usually had a hoop free, and he would shoot for hours, pretending he was a
Celtics player. Bill Russell was his favorite, but to be Russell you needed
someone else to block or defend against. Sam Jones was the best shooter, so
William was usually Jones. He tried to imitate the guard’s perfect shooting
form while pretending the trees that surrounded the court were cheering
fans.
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