The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page B

finished. Only her words kept on coming.
    There is another aspect your health teacher is unlikely to explore. Though he may refer to hormones. No doubt he has done that.
    I braced myself for all the horrifying words then. Ejaculation. Semen. Erection. Pubic hair. Nocturnal emission. Masturbate.
    Desire, she said. People never talk about longing. They act as if making love is all about secretions and body functions and reproduction. They forget to mention how it feels.
    Stop, stop, I wanted to say. I wanted to put my hand over her mouth. I wanted to jump up from the table and run out into the night. Mow the lawn, rake leaves, shovel snow, be anyplace but here.
    There is another kind of hunger, she said, clearing our plates—hers barely touched, as usual—and pouring herself a glass of wine.
    Hunger for the human touch, she said. She sighed deeply then. If there was any doubt before, it was clear. She knew about this one.

Chapter 6
    T HERE IS A THING THAT HAPPENS sometimes, where you wake up and you forget for a minute what happened the day before. It takes your brain a few seconds to reset, before you remember whatever it was that happened—sometimes good, more often bad—that you knew about when you went to bed the night before and blanked out in the night. I remember the feeling from when my father left, and how, when I’d first opened my eyes the next day, and stared out the window, I knew something was wrong without remembering exactly what. Then it came to me.
    When Joe got out of his cage and for three days we didn’t know where he was, and all we could do was scatter hamster food all over the house hoping he’d come out, which he finally did—that was one of those times. When my grandmother died—not because I actually knew her very well, but because my mother had loved her and now she was going to be an orphan, which meant that she would feel even more alone in the world, which meant it was more important than ever for me to stick around and have dinner with her, play cards, listen to her stories, listen to more—that was one of those times.
    The morning after we brought Frank home from Pricemart—the Friday before the start of Labor Day weekend—I woke up forgetting he was there. I just knew something was different at our house.
    The tip-off came when I smelled coffee. This was not how my mother did it. She was never out of bed this early. There was music coming from the radio. Classical.
    Something was baking. Biscuits, it turned out.
    It only took a few seconds before I got it. Unlike other times I’d woken up and then remembered some piece of news, there was no bad feeling to this one. I remembered the silk scarves now, the woman on TV saying the word murderer . Still, the feeling I had, when I thought of Frank, contained no fear. More like anticipation and excitement. It was as if I’d been in the middle of a book that I had to put down when I got too tired to keep reading, or a video put on pause. I wanted to pick back up with the story and find out what happened to the characters, except that the characters were us.
    Coming down the stairs, I considered the possibility that my mother would be where she’d been when I left her the night before, tied in the chair, with her own silk scarves. But the chair was empty. The person at the stove was Frank. He had evidently made some kind of splint for his ankle, and he was still limping, but he was getting around.
    I would have gone out and got us eggs, he said, but it might not be a great idea stepping into the 7-Eleven at this moment. He nodded in the direction of the newspaper, which he must have picked up from the curb where it had been tossed sometime before the sun came up. Above the fold, next to a headline about the heat wave they were predicting for the holiday weekend, a photograph of a face both familiar and unrecognizable—his. Only the man in the photograph had a hard, mean look and a series of