The Far End of Happy by Kathryn Craft Read Free Book Online

room.
    “Listen,” she began. She looked over at Ronnie, and for a brief moment, their eyes met. The intensity of Ronnie’s gaze made Beverly look away. “My daughter doesn’t know this, but I was close to someone who committed suicide. So what are the chances I’ll know someone else? Slim, right?”
    “You looking for comfort, or statistics?”
    “I want comfort from statistics.”
    “I’m no specialist. But I do know that someone kills himself every fourteen minutes in this country.”
    “‘Himself.’ So these are men?”
    “Most of the people who attempt suicide are women, but most of those who succeed are men.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “More men use guns.”
    Beverly clutched her hand to her heart.
    The officer gathered up his papers, gave her a pitying look, and left her to her stunned silence.
    She felt awful for Ronnie, and for the boys. She’d been young herself, only seventeen, when she’d suffered her horrific loss. She’d given Dominic her virgin heart and all the faith and hope that clung to it—and he’d taken it right to the grave. His death had affected every decision she’d made since.
    Beverly knew Ronnie thought she was a lightweight. A flirt. But truth was, she had always hoped she’d find a true, deep love like what she’d witnessed between Ronnie and Jeff in their early years together. Lord knows she tried. With Tony. With Daryl. With Jim. But Beverly just couldn’t make love stick. Her love life was like a game of pinball: thrust forward by a lusty pull on a spring launcher, kept aloft by the flipper of determination, and then hitting a variety of bumpers on the way down the drain.
    Dominic’s beach house had finally lost its allure, and she’d quit going along with Ronnie, Jeff, and the boys. She understood why Ronnie wanted to go; that’s where she dreamed of her father. But that’s where Beverly had fallen in love with him, and each year it had gotten harder to experience the house exactly as it had stood without being able to conjure his spirit. It wasn’t that her wounds still bled; she just no longer saw the point in revisiting her scars.
    Beverly hadn’t dealt with Dom’s loss well at all, but at least she’d had a lifetime to try to get over it.
    As would Ronnie, if she lost Jeff today. That loss would hit her harder than Ronnie could ever imagine, but she was young and had presumably started to envision her life without him.
    But Janet would feel as if she herself had been shot if Jeff pulled the trigger today. And she’d carry a raw, gaping wound for the rest of her life.

ronnie
    A couple of tables away, Ronnie heard an officer ask Will, “So what’s your dad like?”
    Will shrugged. Until today, Ronnie had still thought of her youngest as only a wisp of a boy, but there was hidden strength in his spine. How quickly he had rushed to his father’s side; how bravely he had fought for those keys. Just eight years old and he knew what he was about. The pages of Ronnie’s journals were her search for that kind of instinctual knowing and illustrated all too well the dangers of bending around others too long. It broke her to watch him arrange his face into a mask of indifference, like a man with secrets to keep. His swinging feet just grazed the floor. “He’s nice.”
    She felt certain Andrew was not giving a similar account on the other side of the room. Jeff had never understood Andrew. The family would be raking leaves onto tarps for compost, and Andrew, consumed by other thoughts, would inevitably slip into a daydream and then dance off to the house to draw, or organize his rock collection, or add another alien race to his science fiction screenplay. They’d find the rake abandoned somewhere between the road and the front door. Jeff thought of Andrew as a slacker. Ronnie knew that one day her older son would choose to leave the rural life of eastern Pennsylvania for a richer cultural landscape—and half of her would want to go with him.
    Will was the one