Flora by Gail Godwin Read Free Book Online

visible enough from an upstairs window for his mother to spy on us. We would have drunk her iced apple juice and played Brian’s favorite game, in which he was either auditioning before a hard-to-please New York director (me) for a lead role or being coached by the director in his role.
    If I had stayed at Brian’s last week rather than languishing in luxury at the Huffs’, he would have been in church this morning. As I passed his pew, his princely little profile would have swiveled just enough to beam me a possessive greeting: didn’t we have fun this past week? After church, the Beales would have driven Flora and me back to Old One Thousand and maybe Mrs. Beale would have let him stay overnight. Flora would have made hot biscuits to go with the ham, and for dessert there would have been more of the pound cake she had brought in the suitcase from Alabama. After supper, Brian would have sat down at our out-of-tune piano and picked out some show tunes, and Flora would have praised him and remarked happily on what a nice evening we were having, and then she would have excused herself and retired to the Willow Fanning room. And Brian and I, as we had done since we became spend-the-night friends back in first grade, would have separated to undress and then reconvened in either my room or his, which was my grandfather’s old consulting room. We would have snuggled hip to hip in our pajamas on top of the spread, covering our knees with a quilt, and taken turns reading aloud. I was the faster sight reader, but Brian liked to practice his delivery and his English accent. Sometimes we read from the books we had outgrown for the sake of doing the parts. He was always Eeyore and Piglet and I was always Pooh.
    All Sunday afternoon Flora kept watching me mournfullyas though another member of my family had died and she was expecting me to fall to pieces any minute. “Let me know if I can do anything, honey,” she kept saying.
    “Don’t you have anything you need to do?” I was finally driven to ask.
    She looked hurt, then recovered herself and said she had been hoping to use her time off to prepare sample lesson plans for whichever job came through. She had interviewed for three: one for sixth grade and two for fifth.
    “Then why don’t you go and do that?” I said.
    But as I prowled around downstairs after getting rid of Flora, I felt the house ignoring my existence. I kicked open the kitchen screen door, noticing for the first time that the bottom board, where my foot always landed, had split.
    I decided to walk completely around the house and force it to acknowledge me. The day was still under that stubborn haze that withholds either rain or sunshine.
    When was the last time I had walked all the way around this house? It seemed that for years we had climbed into our cars and gone somewhere and come back and gone into the house. When was the last time anyone had walked around this house? This made me think of Brian, who might never be able to walk around his house again. Other thoughts came. I pushed them away until all that was left was the forlorn scene I was walking through. Everywhere things were falling apart. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, an unattached downspout swinging tipsily out from a roof gutter. The former “front lawn” had become a weedy slope ending in unkempt woods, where two broken old trees had collapsed against each other and were rotting together. Did I really remember a lawn green and smooth enough for me to roll down, over and over again? Who had been with me? Awoman dressed to go somewhere else, looking off into the distance. There was discontent in the air. Was it mine, or hers, or just the day in general? Was I remembering my mother or was my memory as unreliable as my father’s memory of my grandfather’s shortcut to town? It seemed hard to believe that when the Recoverers took their constitutionals on this lawn they could have looked out through healthy, upright trees and seen the