Swimming Sweet Arrow by Maureen Gibbon Read Free Book Online Page B

going to be together instead of just talking about it, the way Del and I did. I was probably just thinking of how I behaved with Del’s brother anyway, and that had nothing at all to do with June.
    In truth, I envied June living in that house. Church’s Mountain was her backyard, and south of the house, private property turned to state game lands where tall pine let no sun to the forest floor. Almost every time I drove out there, I saw a hawk flying above the road or wheeling far out. And of course she was living with Ray. She got to sleep beside him all night and push back against him when she half woke from a dream or just wanted to feel his skin. As much as I loved to fuck Del in a car or on the sly at his mom and dad’s house, what I really wanted was for the two of us to live together.
    But June needed something to go her way. After we graduated, she went around town putting in her applications for a secretarial or typing job. Even though she’d taken the business curriculum the whole four years we were in school, and I knew from being in Miss Leader’s typing class with her that she could type sixty words per minute, she didn’t get one call for an interview.
    “You’re going to get a job sooner or later just because you have that bun on your head,” I said to make her feel better, because she was even doing that: pulling all her hair, which covered her shoulder blades, into a brown donut on the top of her head.
    “It’s called a shin-yon,” she said, and I later found outshe was saying the word chignon, which I never heard pronounced before. From the donut/chignon she let a few pieces sneak out so they strayed prettily around her face and the nape of her neck. I could have told her I knew those pieces were called tendrils, but I didn’t want her to think I was teasing her about the way she talked. Even if we were country girls who fucked in cornfields, we knew how to read, and we knew words like chignon and tendril.
    Even though June looked for almost a month, she could not get a job at any of the businesses in Mahanaqua. They all told her the same thing: that she should go on for more schooling, over to the business institute in Mingo County.—“Well, you could do that,” I said. “You always did get good grades.”
    “Like I have money for it, Vangie.”
    She ended up doing what a lot of girls from our school did: sewing piecework in the factory: It was the one job I told myself I’d never take. I knew I’d rather listen to Neil Roy talk about me sucking his dick than sit hunched over a sewing machine every day. My mom had done it for thirteen years, and she told me it was a killing thing. So if June did have to sit sewing shirt collars all day, I was glad she at least got to go home to Ray, even if there was another person in the house with them.
    I never said this to June, but I thought that if she hadn’t been a Keel, if her father and brothers hadn’t made the name so bad, she might have had a better chance of getting hired. But I think people in Mahanaqua heard the name Keel and figured she was one and the same with Dean andKevin, and no fancy hairdo was going to change their minds.
    I didn’t know the older of June’s brothers at all, but I often saw the younger one in Dreisbach’s. Kevin. He was the one who served time for vehicular manslaughter after striking down an old man on a county road. He came into Dreisbach’s a few times a week for dinner. He did not let on that he knew I was June’s friend, and I was sure he didn’t know. He had no reason to know anything about his sister’s life, judging from the distance June kept from him now. Yet that one time she talked about him, when she told me it was one of his friends that screwed her, I got the feeling things hadn’t always been like that between them, and I wondered what it all meant to Kevin. Did he miss her at all? Was he sorry about letting one of his friends fuck her when she was ten? Was it why June didn’t want to talk