Home Leave: A Novel by Brittani Sonnenberg Read Free Book Online

dry, mischievous English humor that had shocked Elise at first and then been as warm and comforting as this bath. Away from the enormous old churches, the echoing whispers within them, the terrible bravery of what the pastor at All Souls had said from the pulpit, asking questions about God, belief, and goodness, unlike the Baptist ministers of her youth, who had only talked about the quickest way to get to heaven. “I don’t think there is a heaven,” that sad, elderly, wonderful British reverend had admitted one Sunday, as though the congregation were his oldest school friend, sitting next to him at the pub. Then he had read a dismal poem by Philip Larkin, “Church Going,” and sat down heavily, as the choir burst into flames of Bach.
    Of course she had said yes to the move. It was going to be good for Chris’s career; he’d been miserable at the London office, and Elise could find ESL teaching work easily enough. The idea of discovering another country had excited Elise. She had imagined massive German castles on the Rhine and a plate piled high with mashed potatoes, for some reason. Both images had seemed simultaneously reassuring and thrilling. And she and Chris would be there together, with the baby on the way. But in her dreams of Germany she had excluded the fact that Chris would spend all day at work. And she hadn’t seen mashed potatoes once since their arrival.
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    Moving to Hamburg also meant leaving Mississippi again: putting another country, another culture, between the delta and herself. Elise’s southern accent is barely detectable now, though it floods back when she makes long-distance calls to her family. Five thousand miles from Vidalia, Elise misses the five of them more than ever, a longing that gently tugs at her each day and inevitably evaporates the second she calls home. With her mother a sharpness creeps into Elise’s voice, a dismissal that Ada, ever since Elise left, seems only too happy to accept. Her mother’s timidity never fails to fill Elise with fury. It is admitting guilt without saying sorry.
    With Ivy, who is now nineteen, still living at home, Elise feels herself going preachy, doing a secular kind of witnessing, asking about college plans, expressing skepticism over an album that Ivy is thinking of recording with her high school friends. From her brothers, Elise knows that Ivy has been mixing with the wrong crowd: her boyfriend got picked up by the cops for drunk driving last month. But on the phone Ivy is breezy and evasive, and Elise doesn’t have the energy to demand a confession and exact punishment: Ivy has their father for that.
    After these calls, Elise hangs up the phone blinking away tears. Chris assumes she is homesick, gives her a tight hug, but it’s not that, she mutters to him, pulling away, going to run a bath: it’s that home makes her sick. An hour later, flushed, dazed from the hot water, Elise steps from the tub feeling baptized and reborn, shed of home’s cloying insinuations: How could you leave? You shouldn’t tell such tales, Elise.
    *  *  *
    When Elise is not in the bathtub, and when Chris is at work, she finds herself rackingly lonely, a condition she can compare only to a monstrous two weeks at overnight camp in Alabama when she was twelve, where her nickname was Snot because of how much she cried at night. These days she desperately looks forward to German class and then hates it when she is there because the words don’t come out right.
    Plus there is the fact that the teacher, a handsome man in his midtwenties, perhaps even a bit younger than Elise, who is twenty-six, won’t look at her. Men like him—a little shy, a closeted r omantic —have been falling in love with her since she was ten, and it greatly unnerves her that this one stares at the unremarkable midthirties French student instead, who admittedly has much better German pronunciation. Elise supposes it is because of her pregnancy. It makes her feel grotesque and