Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page B

work and Josh was at school. She hadn’t left a note—no hint or clue as to why she did what she did. She had seemed, if not overly happy, at least steady. She had grown up on the island, she had gone away to Plymouth State College, she had worked as an office manager for a construction company. She had few close friends but everybody knew her—Janey Flynn, nee Cumberland. Pretty lady, runs the show at Dimmity Brothers, married to Tom who works out at the airport, one son, good-looking kid, smart as a whip. That was his mother’s biography—nothing flashy but nothing sinister either, no quiet desperation that Tom or Josh knew of. And yet.
    So at the age of twelve Josh was left with just his father, who battled against his anger and confusion and grief with predictability, safety, evenness. Tom Flynn had never yelled at Josh; he never lost his temper; he showed his love the best way he knew how: by working, by putting food on the table, by saving his money to send Josh to Middlebury. But sometimes, when Josh looked at his father, he saw a man suspended in his sorrow, floating in it the way a fetal pig in the biology lab at school floated in formaldehyde.
    “Yeah,” Josh said. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.” Josh wished he had taken a job off-island for the summer, at a camp in Vermont or something. He liked kids.
    The phone rang. Josh finished off his bottle of Sam Adams and went to answer it, since, invariably, it was for him.
    “Josh?” It was Didi. It sounded like she was a couple of drinks ahead of him. “Wanna come over?”
    “Come over” meant sex. Didi rented a basement apartment in a house on Fairgrounds Road, less than a mile away. The apartment was all hers and Josh liked the privacy of it, though it was always damp, and it smelled like her cat.
    “Nah,” he said.
    “Come on,” she said. “Please?”
    Josh thought of Scowling Sister in the green shimmery bikini top.
    “Sorry,” he said. “Not tonight.”
    T he duck-breast sandwich with fig chutney wrapped in white butcher paper from Café L’Auberge on Eleventh Street. Spinach in her teeth. The smell of a new car. Blaine’s preschool field trip to the dairy farm. Colleen Redd’s baby shower. The baseball standings.
    At the end of every winter, Vicki became restless, and this past April the restlessness had been worse than ever before. The skies in Darien were a permanent pewter gray; it rained all the time; it was unseasonably cold. Vicki was trapped in the house; the baby still nursed six times a day and wouldn’t take a bottle, which limited how much Vicki could get out alone. Some days she stayed in her yoga pants until Ted got home from work. She tried to enjoy the quiet rhythm of her days—her kids would only be little once—but increasingly she dreamed of a change in her life. Returning to work, maybe? She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Duke, after all, and at one point had entertained thoughts of going to law school. She craved something private, something entirely her own. An affair, maybe? She’d heard her friends whisper about similar longings—their biology was to blame, a woman hit her sexual peak in her thirties, it was their situation: a husband, small children. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone tending their every need for a change? Suddenly, men everywhere looked good to Vicki—the mechanic who worked on the Yukon, the boys at the gym, the new associates, just out of business school, at Ted’s office. Vicki needed something else in her life, otherwise she would turn into one of these women with too little to do who slowly lost her mind. She felt combustible, like she might burst into flames at any moment. Her anger and her desire scared her. She began to feel a tightness in her chest, and then the tightness, if she wasn’t imagining things, became a pain. She was short of breath. One morning, she woke up huffing like she did when she was in the basement doing laundry and she heard