Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette Read Free Book Online

by an inner wind. They see seaweed swaying in a channel. Corrine asks how long she went to school and if she knows anything about depression. Marie says whatever comes into her head, it will do.
    â€œMy husband’s in the hospital,” Corrine says, as if talking about the seasons. She tells the story with no digressions, a composition in the style of advice to the lovelorn, and all that’s missing is the solution. He’s not really her husband, Pietro, an Italian, withdrawn but charming, she’s been living with him for five years now, or a little less. They had a mobile home on the outskirts of one of those new towns up north where they first met, she was working in a bar, he on the completion of a road. The camps aren’t what they once were, she explains, as if she’d known them all back in the days of the first workers’ settlements, but she won’t say anything about them. The men go down regularly to towns like this one, to join their wives and children and to putter around while awaiting their real return. Pietro was on his own, and they had agreed to make a life together by simple addition.
    The small town had shut down, it happens, cobalt had been mined there and the market was bad. Corrine had persuaded him to move south, where she could find better-paying work, where they wouldn’t be so isolated because the distance stifled her, sometimes. They’d moved into the second floor of the Union Hotel at a special monthly rate and hadn’t budged. Every night Corrine went down to the main floor, behind the bar, and Pietro stayed upstairs, brooding and listening to the radio. He’d become strange, she said, a stranger, and so suddenly. He refused to look for work, he went out only at night when the noises down there had dissipated, he spoke only to her, to grumble about this place or to promise her another life, one that she did not care for, that would take them to the ocean, where he would play the harmonica in the sun.
    Corrine was laughing again. “He’s crazy, I know he is, but he’s so good-looking.” She was sure she could persuade him to stay here once he understood, and she sometimes thought they might buy the little movie theatre next door, where he could rule over all the dreams he wanted. She’d be the cashier and hostess, and they’d go on living late into the night.
    But now he was smoking his nights away, one by one, while he waited for her to come upstairs.
    Last Saturday, at the hour of waifs and strays, he had burst into the bar through the inner door. He saw that she knew them all, all these gaunt young men who were still funny and self-destructive, who would be reborn at noon, who kept Corrine hopping between the tables. She echoed them, she understood them, and they amused her. He left, walking past her, and she found him at dawn, two streets away, stock-still on the parapet of the old hydroplane dock. The lake was oily in the last heat of July. There wasn’t room enough between them for the lapping of a wave or the death of a cicada. Yet he went on talking, piling up plans. They would go to the real south, to where the Gulf of Mexico resembles the area around Civitavecchia, there were plenty of places he’d know without a map, by instinct. He would build houses or repair the plaster of the haciendas, he would grow roses resistant to the scorching heat, he would plant fountains in schoolyards, all year he would drink fresh wine that she alone would serve only to him, he’d teach her how to roast sweet peppers, afternoons she would rest, to swell with child.
    â€œI shut him up then. I said if I had a child I’d kill it.” Pietro didn’t say a word until the next night, he had swallowed a bottle of cheap sleeping pills, he was in no danger but she’d taken him to the hospital, to other stiflers of dreams, who would perhaps teach him resignation. She goes every day to see him, laughs at the white nightshirt