Blue Water by A. Manette Ansay Read Free Book Online

flower.
    â€œCan’t you understand,” I said, “how hard it is to be here without Evan?”
    Toby’s hair had fallen in a tangle over his eyes. “Won’t it be just as hard somewhere else?”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWell, for one thing,” I said, “we won’t have to deal with Cindy Ann anymore.” I waited for him to nod, agree. “I mean, seeing her. Seeing her kids. Watching her going about her life as if nothing even happened.” Again, I waited. “For Pete’s sake, Toby, she’s driving the same damn car. She killed someone, a human being, and it hasn’t made the least bit of difference. She’s still a reckless drunk.”
    â€œMallory says she’s not drinking anymore.”
    â€œMallory would say that.”
    â€œShe says there are days Cindy Ann doesn’t get out of bed.”
    â€œI’ve had some of those days myself.”
    The bubbling sound of the aerators filled the silence between us.
    â€œBut you knew her, Meg,” Toby finally said. “You knew all those girls. You, of all people, know how hard it was for them, growing up in that house.”
    Now I was angry. Of course I knew, as everyone else in town knew, that Cindy Ann’s stepfather had shot himself in the shedbehind the veal pens. It was the excuse people always gave: for Cindy Ann’s failed marriages, for Mallory’s shrill politics, for the middle sister, Becca, going door-to-door for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cindy Ann’s mother was barely in her sixties, and yet she was living in a nursing home, disabled by early Alzheimer’s: hunched, forgetful, smiling. The only child she’d had with Dan Kolb—born when Cindy Ann was twelve—had been what was then called mentally retarded . He’d eventually died in his early teens. This, too, was blamed, implausibly, on Dan Kolb’s suicide.
    â€œSo the family had problems,” I said. “So what. That doesn’t give Cindy Ann the right to drink however many bottles of wine she drank and then get into her car, the hell with everybody else.” I wanted to shake my brother, slap him; my neck and shoulders actually hurt with the effort of restraining myself from doing it. “ She had a choice in all this, remember? Rex and I had no choice. Evan had no choice.”
    â€œI know, I know all that,” Toby said, and at last, he was angry, too. “Evan was my nephew, remember? You think it doesn’t matter to me, too? You think I don’t wake up every single day and think about how awful it is? I’m just saying I feel sorry for her, that’s all.”
    â€œSorry?” I spat the word from my mouth, and then I told him what I’d told no one else: how I’d sat in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, hands gripping the wheel, waiting for Cindy Ann and her ice cream.
    â€œMaybe,” I said, “you’d feel sorry for me if I’d actually run her over.”
    â€œI would feel sorry, Cowboy,” he said. “Sorry for you both.”
    I turned, walked out the door. Hurrying past the front window, I caught a glimpse of him standing between the tanks: one side of his face stricken as my own, the other half lost in darkness. The neondartings of the fish all around him seemed like sparks flying out of his body. I understood I was losing something else, someone else. Someone precious.
    I didn’t go back.
    And then.
    Crossing the parking lot toward my car, the sky growing dark over the lake, I saw—not Cindy Ann Kreisler, but Cindy Ann Donaldson, sixteen years old. Hurrying straight out of our childhoods, out of the single, charmed summer we’d been friends. There was her Dairy Castle uniform. There were her regulation shoes, the white bib, the hairnet and curved paper hat. I’d often met her at closing time, and together, we’d walked to the beach, where we sat on a slab of pale