Souvenir by Therese Fowler Read Free Book Online Page A

coloring her hair black: interested in the possibilities but unwilling to take such a drastic step. What if black hair looked awful? Was black an advantage, or was it just different? If she were the ambitious woman he saw, she would have divorced him as soon as she was earning enough to pay back her parents’ mortgage. She’d have moved “onward and upward,” as was Brian’s refrain. But no, she had already blasted apart the one bridge she’d want to travel again, and so because she wanted to keep Savannah’s life stable and she and Brian were as compatible as she needed them to be, she stayed.
    Standing, she reached down for the notebooks and felt her left knee begin to buckle. She caught herself with one hand on the sofa’s arm. “Getting old, girl,” she said, shaking her head.
    Brian’s voice, persuasive and firm as he talked on the phone, resounded as she passed the kitchen. He was fixing a snack while he talked—warming up brownies, from the smell of it. He’d add vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, which illustrated why she’d had to take his suits in for alteration despite his playing some twenty hours of golf a week. That was the other curse of middle age: a slowing metabolism. Keeping in shape was harder all the time—and she’d skipped her workouts more than she wanted to admit, these months since her mother’s death. There never seemed to be time for exercise; the number of hours in her day had shriveled like an unpicked orange, and she was just too tired to wedge in anything she could excuse as nonessential.
    In the master bathroom, she set down the notebooks and turned on the shower. While it warmed, she rifled through a drawer for the pair of tiny scissors she used to trim her pubic hair. Brian preferred her trimmed, almost hairless, except for the hair on her head, which he liked long, and the coppery down of her arms. How long since she’d bothered to trim herself up? She didn’t even shave her legs weekly anymore. They hadn’t made love in…what was this? April? Two months. Not since Valentine’s Day, and even then it had been more of an expected gesture, a guilty ought-to rather than an anticipated
finally,
which, honestly, hadn’t occurred even in the first months—for her, anyway. As steam drifted around her like unsettled ghosts, she took the scissors and cut the notebooks’ binding string, expecting that when she cracked open the first of them, she’d find blank pages filled with nothing more than pale blue preprinted lines.
    What she found instead came as such a surprise that she reached into the shower and turned the water off.
    A quick perusal showed that each book was filled with neat pages of her mother’s calculations and observations on the status of the farm, the weather, the horses’ health—interspersed, it seemed, with similar comments about Meg and her sisters and father, all done in fine blue or black ink. Seeing the curves and loops made by her mother’s hand weakened Meg; she sank to the thick cotton rug and spread the books around her.
    Had her father known he’d given her
these
? These twelve diaries, as in essence they were, spanned close to two decades, ending the day before he woke on a Sunday morning last September and found his wife had slipped away in the night, leaving behind her stilled body…and these words. Of gossip? Of wisdom?
    If she had known ahead of time that the notebooks were diaries, she never would have opened a single cover. Why
invite
pain? Now, she didn’t know what she would do with them. She didn’t want to read them. She didn’t want not to.
    A knock on the door startled her. “What?”
    “Mom, I need you to sign a thing so I can do the end-of-year field trip.”
    “Can’t Dad do it?”
    “He’s on the phone.”
    Meg piled up the notebooks and stashed them in the vanity cabinet. “I’ll be right out.”

Eight
    M EG SAT IN THE KITCHEN S ATURDAY MORNING, COFFEE IN HAND, NOTEBOOKS stacked on the table before her. Brian