Angels All Over Town by Luanne Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

address in New York?”
    “You bet.”
    “Hey, Boom-Boom, kiss her goodbye and get crackin’,” Kanga, the skipper, commanded. He smiled sadly at me beneath his damp brown moustache. He had seen these tender farewells before. He knew about women’s aching hearts.
    The men of
Manaloa
hoisted her sails, which filled instantly, cracking like gunfire, and she shot away from the dock. Alastair stood on the bow, hidden from my view by the jib. My sisters waited for me at the end of the dock. They wore identical khaki shorts and navy shirts: The Yard’s uniform. Lily filled hers more fully than Margo.
    “It hurts too much to say au revoir, so let’s just say hors d’oeuvre,” Margo said to me.
    “It is sad,” I said, surprising myself. How tender I felt! How deserted! Robbed by the sea of love, alone and lonely. But perhaps my feeling had more to do with the mere fact of being left than with the man who was leaving.
    “Wild leaves tomorrow,” Lily said. “I’m thinking of bagging this place and heading for Fort Lauderdale.”
    “You can’t. You have to be in Providence in two weeks,” I said.
    “Just for one more semester. Maybe I’ll go to Florida in time to miss the snow.”
    “You love the snow,” Margo said.
    “I love Wild more. I am serious about this.”
    “How serious can you be?” I asked. “You have one semester of graduate school left. What about the Tate Gallery? What about New York?”
    “I know, I know.” Lily’s eyes were scanning Dock 2 for signs of the Wild One. The boat he sailed on,
Dauntless
, looked deserted.
    “Lily, he’s a sailor. Sailors don’t get married, or if they do, they don’t stay at home,” Margo said.
    “Just like Dad,” Lily said, smirking. We all laughed. Our father and his vagabond ways were always good for a chuckle. “Speaking of which,” Lily said, looking at me, “any more sightings?”
    “No. Not since that time in the apartment.” I spoke steadily, without wavering. I ran through the facts in my mind. Dad’s ghost had dropped in for a visit. He had also been to the Algonquin. It might be possible for me to see him at any time. But at the same moment a feeling of craziness clouded my brain. I knew how it sounded. It made no sense. Before I had seen him I had not believed in ghosts, reincarnation, or heaven. Perhaps I still didn’t. Perhaps he had been no more than a foggy dream after a bad year of death, John Luddington, and loveless, guilty nights. I envied Lily for her raw love of Bruno, but I also wanted to warn her: men die or defect, but they leave you one way or the other.
    The following weeks passed in a late-summer haze. Early mornings were chillier, but the sea retained heat and kept the air warm. Restless air currents carried autumn down from Canada, and by our last week in Newport, the trees along Ocean Drive had started to turn.
    “Let’s take a sea cruise!” Margo announced one morning when my anxiety about returning to New York had reached fever pitch and Lily’s empty longing to see Bruno had plunged her to her nadir. We piled into the front seat of our father’s old Volvo wagon and, with Lily driving, me wedged beside the gearbox, and Margo smoking a cigarette out the open window, we drove away, six breasts abreast, toward Ocean Drive.
    The drive winds for approximately six miles along Newport’s southern coast, beginning at Hammersmith Farm, where Jacqueline Bouvier spent her girlhood summers, and ending at Bellevue Avenue, where the robber barons’ glittering palaces erected during the last century still remain, each “cottage” now either a museum or a packet of twenty or so condos. In between stretched wonderful Ocean Drive. It bordered the wildest stretch of Atlantic south of Maine. One could see: crashing surf, craggy rocks, dories, calm bays, swans, pheasants, hedgehogs, bowers of wild roses and orange daylilies, owls hunting over fields of dry grass, marshes, fishermen catching striped bass, ships coming home from