Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey

her fingertips had left a dark purple welt that so appalled her, she didn’t speak to Georgia for a full day, as if she had been the one responsible. Just the title page, perhaps. Nothing of substance would be lost.
    “Some good bits, though,” her father had said, handing her his poems over breakfast, asking for her opinion. The last time she saw him. “But be kind to your old dad. Don’t give me the full editorial treatment. Big picture. Favorite and least favorite lines. Triumphs and disasters. That sort of thing. But I hope you like them, Flora-Girl, I really do.”
    She threw her tea on the fire. It released an unsatisfying hiss, then a sputter, then nothing. There would be no incinerating, no disinterring. She was not a deranged genius; she was no book burner; there were limits, even, to her selfishness. She turned the page and faced the first poem.

    It was a Tuesday evening, after dinner at Ponzu, that her father told Flora without her mother, breaking with the standard practice, the recommended protocol of both parents presenting a united front, a last hurrah of togetherness, an encore. He said afterward, when it had become another thing for them to fight over, that he’d felt he had to; something Flora said had made him think she knew. Flora didn’t know what that was, what it could have been. She knew nothing. How could she have known? Her father took the tea and English muffin up to her mother in bed every morning—he always did this, up until the very end. Then he and Flora ate their breakfasts together in the big kitchen, on the tall white stools, resting their elbows on the red Formica countertop, and then he’d make her lunch and take her to school. Every day, like that, just the same.
    When he told her, he said, “Your mother and I have reached an end,” as though there were many possible ends and they had arrived at one by chance, as though it were a board game, or a choose-your-own-adventure story, and she said, “I don’t know what you mean,” though she was crying. She was sitting on the ground on the rough gray industrial carpet on the third floor, once the maids’ quarters, now the family area, and she was crying and sweating a little, and she said, “I don’t know what you mean,” and he said, “We’re filing for divorce.” And she cried, sitting on the floor, with her father in a chair above her, and she didn’t want him to come near her, to comfort her, and he didn’t try to, as if he knew, or didn’t care. She wanted to run away and throw herself down the stairs, down all the stairs in one great leap, to smash her body into the floor below.
    Once she knew what they had known for a few months, there was no need for pretense, no need for civility. She wanted to not know, to unknow. Before, they had spoken in French so she wouldn’t understand, laughing exotic secrets to each other. Now they fought in French when they remembered or cared that she could hear them. Her mother cried and ate Reese’s peanut butter cups. “Your father is such a prick,” she told Flora as she braided her hair tightly for school. Her father moved into the guest room and had a private phone line installed. “Your mother is a sick woman,” he said, buttering Flora’s English muffin.
    The house, in its institutional grandeur, was impervious to them, untroubled by their misery. It easily accommodated her father’s move, and the new private phone line. He disappeared into the gold room. Flora rarely saw him, except at breakfast, which was weirdly normal, their routines impervious to them as well. When she saw him in the evenings, he was on his phone, already tethered to another person, another life. He hired Jimmy Mills, a local sleazebag, as his divorce lawyer. “Dark Satanic Mills,” her mother called him. Flora didn’t get the joke. The only one who got the joke was her father, and he pretended it wasn’t funny. They’d reached a stalemate in the financial agreement. They would all live