The Glass Castle: Parts III, IV, and V

Scrubbing clothes on a washboard until her knuckles bled — that was the preeminent memory of Erma’s childhood.

After Mom and Dad left, Erma became even more cantankerous.

Erma relegated us to the basement after that.

“It’s not exactly palatial, so there’s going to be a lot of togetherness,” Mom said.

The front, including a drooping porch, jutted precariously into the air, supported by tall, spindly cinder-block pillars.

He decided it was too convoluted to bother fixing.

He was bathing in it, wallowing in it, positively luxuriating in it, his flickering tail hanging over the side of the bowl, flinging sugar across the table.

I stirred it as hard as I could and kept stirring even after I knew the paint was ruined, because I also knew that we’d never get more, and instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job — one that announced to the world that the people inside the house wanted to fix it up but lacked the gumption to get the work done.

The other kids treated her like a total pariah...

I expected Mom to come back with one of her choice remarks, but she listened to my tirade in silence.

But the positive thoughts would give way to negative thoughts, and the negative thoughts seemed to swoop into her mind the way a big flock of black crows takes over the landscape, sitting thick in the trees and on the fence rails and lawns, staring at you in ominous silence.

One day after Mr. Becker had come back from lunch and ostentatiously checked the display cases, I was so furious that I looked around to see if there was anything in the entire darn store worth stealing.

Mom and Dad moved into a six-story flophouse in a more dilapidated neighborhood.

I had seen Mom only sporadically since then, and she’d never met John nor been to the old country farmhouse we’d bought the year before.