Brown-Eyed Girl by Virginia Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

the bathroom to brush teeth. Slip on those Birkenstocks. Back down to the kitchen for coffee, and then out the back door. This great Laramie garden, in full late summerburst, made her forget she had a lot of work ahead, dissipated worry about angry academics and greedy burglars. She walked between the rows of beans, along the low pea fences and admired the high trellises of scarlet runner beans, festooned with red blossoms, dripping with dangling green pendants. Lettuces and spinaches, cool multicolor bouquets of cauliflowers, broccoli, and pale and purple kales. Heaped mounds bursting with huge flat leaves that shaded squashes.
    Wyoming vegetable gardens had few pests. Pests weren’t stupid. Why try to survive in a place this hard? Did horn worms, zucchini beetles, stinging caterpillars, and their brethren care more about a view, or were they practical enough to opt for a place where it wouldn’t freeze eleven out of twelve months? Well, maybe they were stupid, but they wouldn’t pick a place where they would die before laying their eggs. Sally liked a view, but she figured it took a big brain to care about whether you could see the mountains from town. Big brain, yeah, but not necessarily a smart animal.
    She carried a knife, a huge canning kettle, her coffee cup. Walking among the rows, she cut this, chopped that, pinched the other, drank coffee. She walked back to the house with the big pot piled full of vegetables. She shed the Birkenstocks at the back door and left the heavy kettle on the kitchen table.
    Now she put on her socks and shoes, her Walkman, and headed out running. Then it was weird KFAT music, more coffee, a day of reading over the stuff she’d gotten from the Dunwoodie Foundation, browsing Meg’s books, picking idly at her guitar, eating Maude’s vegetables, pouring a Jim Beam to watch the sunset. For three days it went like this, but on the fourth, Monday, something changed when she returned from her run.
    The phone rang. “Katmandu calling,” said a voice.
    Less than twenty-four hours after last spring’s graduation, Dean Edna McCaffrey and her second husband had been on a one-stop flight from Denver to New York, the first leg of the marathon air trek to Nepal, via London, Istanbul, and New Delhi. After spending three months as a working guest of disciples of the Dalai Lama, she and Tom had returned late at night, conked out, and woken to discover a dead lawn, a houseful of shriveled ferns and a nightmarish parade of answering machine messages. Some messages were welcome: “Hi, Edna. This is Sally. I’m here, ready to have a beverage and talk about Dunwoodie chairs and whatever. Your place or mine?” This made Edna smile.
    The next message, which touched on something like the same subject, was substantially less welcome. “Hello, Edna. This is Byron Bosworth. We need to talk about the History Department’s role in administering the Dunwoodie bequest. The department has met to discuss this matter, and I’ve sent a memo outlining our funding needs for the year to your office. I’ve had your secretary set up a meeting for Wednesday afternoon before school starts.” Click. Far be it for the Boz to waste words on the likes of Edna. Edna smiled at this one, too, but it wasn’t a very nice smile.
    Eighteen years ago, Byron Bosworth had told Edna’s then-husband that he thought there was “no room for faculty wives in a university that has real standards.” It was a shame that the anthropology department had seen fit to hire Edna as a part-time adjunct instructor. Edna nevertheless instructed along for another year, publishing articles and writing grant proposals, then accepted a two-year appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Her children went with her to New Jersey, while her husband remained in Laramie. They pretended the separation was only temporary.
    At Princeton, Edna had worked closely with Rodney