As Good As Gone (9781616206000) by Larry Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

sure how she arrived at that conclusion; she can’t recall ever seeing Ann in the car. The truck parks by the Sidey garage.
    It’s no teenager who steps out of the truck but an older man. He’s tall, and his posture brings him up even taller; there’s not a trace of slouch or slump in his back or shoulders. He’s dressed in boots, faded Levi’s, a western shirt, and a battered, sweat-­stained cowboy hat. He needs a haircut; his white hair curls and tufts over his collar and behind his ears.
    Beverly watches while he lifts an old leather suitcase from the back of the truck. He begins to walk toward the Sidey home, and something in his stride—rapid, purposeful—makes Beverly feel for an instant that the Sideys should be warned, that on this hot, dry Saturday afternoon a man who portends danger to the family is coming their way. Then she sees his face, and she almost laughs out loud in relief and embarrassment.
    Yes, his expression is stern and maybe even a little menacing—he has a large jaw and a wide mouth and both seem locked tight with determination. Even with his hat pulled low he squints against the light and that puts even more wrinkles in his leathery skin. But the truth is, Beverly Lodge knows him: Calvin Sidey, father to Bill, grandfather to Ann and Will, and who once lived in that very house.
    Like Bill Sidey, Beverly lives on the same block on which she grew up, although, unlike Bill, not in the same house. Beverly’s parents lived at the bottom of Fourth Street’s hill in a small frame house that is currently painted a mustardy yellow so ghastly that Beverly often goes out of her way so she doesn’t have to drive past it. She certainly grew up with the awareness that her family—her three older sisters, their mother, and postal-­clerk father—were on the lower end of Fourth Street, both literally and figuratively. And one of the families living at the top of the block was the Sideys, able to afford a house of stone rather than sticks because the senior Mr. Sidey—did Beverly ever know his name or had he been only initials, G. W., to her as to everyone in Gladstone?—bought land cheaply when he came to Montana.
    The Sideys had a son, Calvin, and two daughters, Wilma and another who died in infancy. Calvin was at least ten years older than Beverly, but her aunt Doris was Calvin’s age, and for many years of their youth Doris had a desperate crush on Calvin, though Beverly now has trouble reconciling these twin facts with the image of her aunt, crippled with a stroke in a Seattle old people’s home, and this fierce old man walking across the grass.
    From her aunt’s descriptions of Calvin back then, Beverly was not surprised that her aunt, or any female, was in love with him. He was a top-­notch student and athlete, the broad-­shouldered, blue-­eyed handsome boy who was always chosen as captain or president. He wore lightly his mantle as son of a rich man, his aloofness excused as shyness. Then, when he graduated from high school, rather than go away to college or begin the gradual but inevitable process of taking over his father’s real estate business, Calvin Sidey left Gladstone and hired on as a ranch hand.
    The cowboy life Calvin signed on for was rawhide rough, yet many young people regarded him with even more envy than before. As they saw it, they were buckling themselves into stultifying jobs that would constrict them all their lives, while Calvin was galloping free across the prairie. When war broke out in Europe, Calvin was one of the first to enlist, and after the war, Calvin came home with ribbons on his chest and a beautiful French wife at his side.
    Soon, however, Calvin was no longer the embodiment of a free, rebellious life; he moved into his parents’ home, and he began to sell real estate with his father.
    And that was the Calvin Sidey whom Beverly knew best from her own memory, simply one more of