The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

family’s feelings.
    Worse: Harriet’s father was always right, even when he was wrong. Everything was a test of wills. Though he was quite inflexible in his opinions, he loved to argue; and even in good moods (settled back in his chair with a cocktail, half-watching the television) he liked to needle Harriet, and tease her, just to show her who was boss. “Smart girls aren’t popular,” he’d say. Or: “No point of educating you when you’re just going to grow up and get married.” And because Harriet was incensed by this sort of talk—which he considered the plain, good-natured truth—and refused to take it, there was trouble. Sometimes he whipped Harriet with a belt—for talking back—while Allison looked on glassy-eyed and their mother cowered in the bedroom. Other times, as punishment, heassigned Harriet tremendous, un-doable chores (mowing the yard with the push mower, cleaning the whole attic by herself) which Harriet simply planted her feet and refused to do. “Go on!” Ida Rhew would say, poking her head through the attic door with a worried look, after her father had stormed downstairs. “You better get going or he going to tear you up some more when he gets back!”
    But Harriet—glowering amidst stacks of papers and old magazines—would not budge. He could whip her all he wanted; never mind. It was the principle of the thing. And often Ida was so worried for Harriet that she would abandon her own work, and go upstairs and do the thing herself.
    Because her father was so quarrelsome and disruptive, and so dissatisfied with everything, it seemed right to Harriet that he did not live at home. Never had she been struck by the strangeness of the arrangement, or realized that people thought it odd, until one afternoon in fourth grade when her school bus broke down on a country road. Harriet was seated next to a talkative younger girl named Christy Dooley, who had big front teeth and wore a white crochet poncho to school every day. She was the daughter of a policeman, though nothing in her white-mouse appearance or twitchy manner suggested this. Between sips of leftover vegetable soup from her Thermos bottle, she chattered without encouragement, repeating various secrets (about teachers, about other people’s parents) that she had heard at home. Harriet stared bleakly out the window, waiting for somebody to come and fix the bus, until she became aware, with a jolt, that Christy was talking about her own mother and father.
    Harriet turned to stare. Oh,
everybody
knew, Christy whispered, huddling close under her poncho (she always wanted to sit closer than was comfortable). Didn’t Harriet wonder why her dad lived out of town?
    “He works there,” said Harriet. Never before had this explanation struck her as inadequate, but Christy gave a satisfied and very adult little sigh, and then told Harriet the real story. The gist of it was this: Harriet’s father wanted to move after Robin died—to a new town, someplace he could “start over.” Christy’s eyes widened with a confidential spookiness.“But
she
wouldn’t go.” It was as if Christy was talking not about Harriet’s own mother but some woman in a ghost story. “She said
she
was going to
stay forever.
”
    Harriet—who was annoyed to be sitting by Christy in the first place—slid away from her on the seat and looked out the window.
    “Are you mad?” said Christy slyly.
    “No.”
    “What’s wrong then?”
    “Your breath smells like soup.”
    In the years since, Harriet had heard other remarks, from both children and adults, to the effect that there was something “creepy” about her household but these struck Harriet as ridiculous. Her family’s living arrangements were practical—even ingenious. Her father’s job in Nashville paid the bills, but no one enjoyed his holiday visits; he did not love Edie and the aunts; and everybody was disturbed by the hard, infuriating way he badgered Harriet’s mother. Last year he had nagged