A Place We Knew Well by Susan Carol McCarthy Read Free Book Online

a rocket mechanic.”
    They’d shared a laugh over that one, but this going to the dance together, Avery thought, was something else entirely.
    Now, apparently resolved, Charlotte lifted her chin. “Thank you, Emilio,” she said. “I’d like that very much.”
    “Great!” Steve crowed and turned on his heel back to the Chrysler.
    Emilio’s delighted grin matched Charlotte’s, but before he could say more the
ding-ding
of the gas bell drew him out to the pumps.
    “But of course,” Charlotte said quietly, favoring Avery with the
Daddy’s girl
look that never failed to sway him, “
you’ll
have to square it with Mom.” Pointing out a slight letup in the rain, she added, “This be a good time to run me home?”
    “Sure, honey,” he said. The sooner Sarah was in the loop on this thing, the better. He grabbed his keys. “Hey, Steve, she’s all yours for a few.”
    “Roger Wilco, Cap,” Steve called back from under the Chrysler’s hood.
    With waves to Emilio, Avery and Charlotte dashed through the splattering rain to the green pickup, which Charlotte had nicknamed Otto for the words— ORANGE TOWN TEXACO, PRINCETON AT THE TRAIL, COLLEGE PARK —painted on both doors beneath the red-and-white Texaco star.
    College Park was a burgeoning Orlando neighborhood that could boast neither a college nor a park. It was originally conceived as Orange Town, because it was bordered on the east by Orange Avenue, the main drag into downtown, and on the west by busy State Route 441, known locally as the Orange Blossom Trail. It was renamed College Park, however, when the developer’s wife suggested “classing up” the titles of its red-brick streets to Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the like.
    Thus far, the community had two dubious claims to fame: First, it was the neighborhood that Colonel Mike McCoy had crashed himself to save. Second, it was the place where poor old Mrs. Kerouac’s son Jack, having barely survived a trip to Mexico, arrived on her doorstep flat broke, spent the summer of ’57 on her back porch, mostly drunk, writing stories about his bum friends in San Francisco, and, that fall, received word that
The New York Times
thought him “the Voice of the Beat Generation.” Whatever that was.
    Avery wheeled east over the Southern Seaboard Railroad tracks, past the cottage on Princeton that had been their first home and was now one of three rentals he owned. At the light, he turned left on Northumberland, crossed Smith, Vassar, and the inadvertently misspelled Radclyffe, then headed right on Bryn Mawr into the low-slung split-level on pocket Lake Silver.
    He pulled in under the cover of the carport and parked beside Sarah’s Buick. Entering the kitchen, they heard the low rumble of her voice.
    “I
told
them the storm’s turning, Edith…,” she was saying and, seeing them, rolled her eyes at the woman on the other end of the phone line. “…the husband’s refusing to make the drive.” She compressed frustrated lips. “I said that, too….”
    “Hey, reinforcements!” Elsie Stout called from the propped-open doorway to the dining room, waving a handful of folded brochures.
    “Would
you
like to call him?” Sarah was asking. “I have the number right here.”
    “I’ve got to get back,” Avery told Elsie, “but maybe Charlotte…”
    The half smile Charlotte had worn all the way home spread wide at the sight of their next-door neighbor. “Reinforcements for what?” she asked brightly, obviously relieved that, with Elsie there, any discussion of her date with Emilio was delayed till later.
    “Right this way,” Elsie said, ushering her out of the room.
    “I really don’t think…” With the fingers of her free hand, Sarah pressed and circled the spot between her brows where she tended to get headaches. Avery gave her shoulder an encouraging squeeze, then returned, driving back through the renewed downpour, to work.
    At the station, Emilio was out front, replacing the wiper blades on Dick