Around the Bend by Shirley Jump Read Free Book Online Page A

Albany. The signs were tricky, a little confusing, and I was quiet until I was sure we were going the right way. “Yeah, but I’m kind of fickle. I think that comes from working at Ernie’s. I hear so much music that I have a new favorite every year. I used to be strictly a Bruce girl then—”
    “Bruce?”
    “Bruce Springsteen. You know, ‘Glory Days,’ ‘Born to Run.’”
    “Oh.” She thought a minute. “Is that the song you used to play all the time in your room? The one about cars and getting out of town?”
    My gaze settled on my mother, absorbing her lean frame with surprise. She’d passed by the closed door of my room hundreds of times over the years, and I’d never thought that she’d paused, maybe put her ear against the six-panel oak to listen, to take an aural peek into her daughter’s world. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
    She nodded. “It’s a nice song. Kind of…wild.”
    “Like me.”
    A smile crossed her lips, the kind that was soft, almost private, caught up with memories and shared connections, and in that moment, I felt like maybe there was hope for my mother and I, that a bridge really did exist somewhere out there, and all we had to do was find the right path to get to it. “Yes, like you,” she said.
    The angry blare of a horn sounded behind us and I jerkedmy attention back to the road, pulling the wheel straight again. My heart leapt in my throat, pulse jumped, breath caught, then all settled again when I realized all I’d done was stray a few inches too far to the left.
    “See?” my mother said, her voice back in full-on parental mode. “This is exactly why I don’t like to listen to music while we’re driving.”
    And just like that, the bridge disappeared into the mist.
     
    “If we keep stopping like this, we’ll never get to Uncle Morty’s.” We’d stopped at the Shaker Heritage Society in Albany, the Corning Museum of Glass in Syracuse, made a quick one-day detour to Niagara Falls, and were now trying to fit in one more stop before the sun went down. I was exhausted, irritated and felt like I’d done an entire week of both The Amazing Race and Survivor , all in a two-day period.
    And all the while, I wondered what was going on back home. In Nick’s head. He’d issued me, more or less, an ultimatum. I was putting distance between us, literally and figuratively. The more I did that, the more I worried that he wouldn’t be there when I got back. That there’d be no returning to the easy, comfortable relationship we’d had.
    Considering I was not going to take that next step with him—already I’d had that nice little Barry Manilow preview of my future and it scared the pants off me—I fretted about what steps he was making.
    “Your father needs to see the country, and so do I.” My mother was standing on the rough beach shores of Lake Erie, holding up the cardboard figure of my father. A howling wind curled around the lake, turning the edges of the wavesto froth, then pushed at my father, as if trying to knock him over, testing my mother’s strength. “Take the picture, Hilary.”
    Reginald had opted to stay in the car. Smart pig.
    “Ma, this is crazy.” Nevertheless, I raised the digital camera and snapped the picture, capturing my father’s windswept head, just before the real, present-day wind bent it back.
    Red filled my mother’s cheeks, her hair lifted in the fierce breeze and her navy pumps sank in the damp sand. Yet she stood there, even after I shouted that I had taken the picture, clutching the cutout of her husband.
    “Ma? You coming? We have to get back on the road.”
    “Yes, yes, of course.” But the wind battled against her, pushing her toward the lake, using my father as leverage, sinking her kitten heels farther into the earth. She bowed her head and pressed forward, but seemed frozen there. I slung the camera over my shoulder and hurried down the beach, sand gritting between the foam of my flip-flops. Lake Erie clearly wasn’t as