The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

Craig’s face, as devastated as sadie’s, and she felt tortured with guilt, knowing that despite his sorrow he would have never wished it were her instead. sylvia had drawn pictures for the baby. To Lily, she’d written on one. someone—Craig, or his mother, who’d arrived out of the blue from Denver—had put the picture on the altar by the little casket. sadie didn’t want the casket, the service, the stone. but if she remembered about this place she would have chosen it over the new cemetery—never mind that no one has been buried here since 1823.
Harriet eventually wanders over.
“you’ve gotten these down then?” she asks.
sadie hasn’t written anything. she rises, slowly, leaning on the stone for support. “you’ll have to excuse me,” she says, handing her the pen and the pad.
And then she walks off through the woods. Harriet calls her; she can hear the woman’s voice, first quizzical, then the edge of panic in it. sadie ignores her. she walks through the abandoned orchard and up the rise of land where the trees have grown together, and the way is clotted with saplings and fallen leaves. It takes her a long time to reach the crest that looks down into Hamlet Hill. There is her old house, a Dutch Colonial, looking much the same as it did years before, although a vine has gotten up the side of the garage and wound its way into the gutter. The back deck is peeling and sagging. The sliding glass doors into the basement are dark and cold looking. she walks down the woods, crosses the little brook, and goes through the side yard, where the pines have grown so tall they form a thick wall separating the yards.
From the front the house looks more in decline. The siding has come off—a strip of it sags up high near the roof. The maple tree seems dwarfed, and she realizes that it is a new tree, that the old one must have died and been replaced with a Japanese maple, the leaves a bright solid red and ugly to sadie, who grew up with the sugar maple’s brilliant gradations of color. betty’s house across the street seems to be in better shape. sadie hasn’t heard from betty in years. she knows that her father got sick and sold the house, that he and betty’s mother moved to a retirement community near the shore. betty and her siblings live scattered across the state. every so often sadie runs into one of them, and despite the way time erases the past, they still avert their eyes and pretend they don’t know her, rather than try to come up with something to say to her.
sadie feels urged to walk up to the front door of her old house and open it and walk inside. she imagines the interior unchanged—the wallpaper the same, the slate hall, the empty living room, the carpeted stairway. she stares up at her house, half-expecting to see her mother peering out one of the bedroom windows. she cannot decide where to go next. Up the street is bea sidelman’s, and farther, the Filleys’ house, wappaquasset. she wonders if ray Filley is still in town, imagines him spread out on his childhood bed, and then she remembers that beth is living there as well. sadie feels a vague unease at the prospect of running into beth, and she decides to head down Hamlet Hill road instead, past the schusters’, the battistons’, the Frobels’, past Francie bingham’s house, imagining each of them the way they were that last summer—their freshly painted shutters, the potted geraniums, the smell of the lawn sprinklers hitting the hot tar, the hazy time between afternoon and evening, the sound of children in the yards playing Mother, May I?
she walks to the end where Hamlet Hill meets wadhams road and continues down wadhams until Craig, alerted by Harriet, passes by in his car, searching for her. He pulls over and flings his door open, approaches her on the road with a look of incredulity, his arms out, his suit coat flapping. she senses he is there to rescue her, though she is unsure what he is saving her from, and she feels both relief