After Her by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page B

with a woman. How to be with a daughter who was no longer a child might have left him at a loss—a rare state for our father to find himself in, but it seemed this was so.
    The only person I talked with about this was my sister. She was the only one I talked with about anything real, same as I was the only one for her.
    Nights in bed (Patty top bunk, me bottom) we listened to music on our transistor radio and our tinny portable record player (Peter Frampton, Cat Stevens, Linda Ronstadt; the wilder stuff like Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd reserved for daytime).
    We whispered to each other for hours, and it seemed there was no topic we couldn’t discuss: What would Patty choose if our mother suddenly allowed us to have a dog: an adorable puppy or an old rescue dog that really needed a home? What happened to your body when you died? And—after seeing Jaws —whether we’d want to go on living if a shark bit off our legs and arms. (Or where we’d draw the line. Two legs, one arm? Both legs? One arm, one leg? We considered every possible variation.)
    We discussed God (I didn’t believe in him; Patty did) and our parents’ divorce—though that was long ago now. Knowing he wasn’t with us, and he lived alone, we speculated about what our father did those times he wasn’t at the Civic Center working on one of his cases. Though he never talked about this, even when we asked, he definitely seemed like the type to have a girlfriend, and if he did, we knew she must be beautiful. One name stuck in my head, but I didn’t ask about her. If our father wanted to say something, he would, and meanwhile it felt disloyal to our mother to speak it out loud.
    Our mother’s story contained little mystery. Since the divorce she had inhabited a deep, irretrievable place of cold, gray sadness, as if our father’s departure from her life had banished all that remained of sunlight. We never questioned that she loved us, but her behavior suggested that of a person suffering from some contagious disease, who knows she might contaminate the people she loves if she gets too close to them. She brought home groceries after work from her job as a typist (the term secretary implying more status than she afforded herself) and took us shopping for school clothes when she could, but more than any children we knew, we were left to our own devices much of the time, with a mostly empty refrigerator and too-tight sneakers, saltines and cheese slices or canned soup for dinner, and a faint smell of smoke coming from the crack under her door to let us know she was in there with one of her library books.
    But our father’s story was more complicated. There was the mysterious Margaret Ann (whose name our mother cried out on the last night our father ever lived at our house; then never again).
    Then there were all the others. Patty and I would be out with him, and some woman we’d never met would call out to him or come over to us, and there’d be this look between them that made us feel she knew all kinds of things we didn’t.
    After, I might ask who that was, and he’d say, “Someone I met one time.” He might mention that she worked at a flower shop he stopped at (buying flowers for someone else, more than likely), or at the dealership where he got the Alfa serviced, or she sold him a pair of boots a few months back. One time it was the judge in a case in which he’d testified. But the way she’d looked at him in the parking lot outside the gas station where we’d seen her—rearranging her hair, or that thing they all seemed to do, touching their neck—made her seem like a woman more than a judge.
    â€œI don’t see what’s the big deal about sex,” Patty said one time. The teenage daughter of a family down the street, on Patty’s paper route, had made the comment to my sister that our father was sexy. This led to a discussion of what made a person