The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter Read Free Book Online Page A

once-in-a-lifetime happening.”
    â€œWas it?’
    â€œYes.” Didn’t he know Halley’s Comet came only once about every seventy-five years? Unless they lived to be a hundred …
    â€œDid you enjoy that?”
    â€œI loved it.”
    â€œWould you like to do it again?”
    He led her back up the hill, turned around where they’d begun, and together they walked all the way down the hill again, to the water and the stones. Neither spoke. It felt extravagant, as if Lloyd had really caused the comet to make its visitation twice in a lifetime instead of only once, through some miraculous intervention. It delighted her. Only later, as they lay tangled in his bed, did it occur to her to wonder whether Lloyd had bothered to look up at the comet at all.
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    Part Two

 
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    The Freedom in American Songs
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    Jennifer had been at Kerry to get rid of the antique gate in the garage for over twenty years. She was right. He knew she was—it was just that it was a beautiful gate—its sinuous garlands and lilies reminded him of the elfin grot in Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci —and he’d always imagined he might put it up at the entrance to their nonexistent country place, though he’d known the gate really belonged to something out of the last century, some humongous heap of a place in the rich part of town. It was outrageous, really, the size of it—Jennifer was right. And he had put ads in the paper and online, but he had never in a million years dreamed that who should come to see the gate but …
    The visitor shook his hand and said, “Xavier, my name’s Xavier Boland,” and Kerry wondered if there could be more than one Xavier Boland, or if he had misheard the name.
    Looking his visitor in the face he could not see the features of his old acquaintance, and the visitor made no intimation that he recognized Kerry at all. That was what happened, wasn’t it? How many times had people from thirty-five years ago contacted him on Facebook and how many times had their photographs—bald, mature, devoid of life, some of them—how many times had those faces borne no resemblance at all to Josh Gardner’s or Roderick Forestall’s faces as he had known them in high school? Roderick Forestall and his crowd had not given him the time of day back then. In fact they had made Kerry’s life miserable, yet now they were somehow supposed to be his Facebook friends. But this visitor, who wanted to see the antique gate—Kerry had never expected to lay eyes on him again, though hardly a week had gone by in the last three and a half decades when the thought of Xavier Boland had not crossed his mind.
    â€œKeith,” Kerry lied. “My name’s Keith.” He did not feel too bad about the untruth, because he had hated his real name from childhood and had he taken the step of officially changing it, Keith would have been one of his first choices.
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    In 1976 Kerry Fallon had daily wished his mother had not called him Kerry, at least not in Creek Bend. His mother had been innocent: she had been thinking of Irish things, though she was not Irish and had called her other son the normal name of Steve. All Kerry knew was that his name hampered his wish that his grade ten classmates at Dearborn Collegiate High School would stop calling him queer, or a girl. He wished this all the more since he himself suspected he might be at least partly gay. What other explanation could a person have for getting weak in the chest every time Xavier Boland passed by on his way to the only pink locker outside Mr. Stockley’s chemistry classroom? How had Xavier got away with it? Xavier had somehow managed to get the painters to leave his locker the old pink shade that had covered all the second-floor lockers prior to the summer of 1975, without Roland Artufi or Kenneth