The Shore by Sara Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

boy’s mind against her that by the time he was old enough to choose for himself he had no wish to see her.
    Kathy and her husband had also had one daughter, Nancy, who had been so anxious as a child that by the age of fourteen she refused to leave the house. Grandpa Tom had taken them to visit her a few times when they were young; Sally only remembered a quiet, mousy woman, the apartment over Kathy’s dressmaker’s shop cool and dim and smelling of face cream and zwieback. Kathy’s son had fared much better, and between him and Helen’s four children there were more cousins than they could count or keep track of, and since they were all much older or much younger than her and Mitch, Sally never bothered.
    She sits for a moment in the parking lot, soaking in the damp chill of air conditioning before cutting off the motor. She can see Mitch in one of the shallow alcoves in the face of the building, crouched with his back against the cement. He works selling imported wine at Morgan’s Specialty Foods in Onancockand walks over to the home when he finishes in the afternoons. It’s not until she gets close that she sees the phone at his ear, the crooked smile even though he’s slowly rubbing his eyes with two fingers in the way that he does when he’s had enough. She catches him in her shadow, and he mumbles a hurried goodbye before clicking off the phone.
    “How’s Brian?” she asks as she takes his hand and pulls him up. They’re of a height still, though Mitch is barrel-chested and she’s what her dad describes as “wiry as a polecat.”
    “What makes you think I was talking to Brian?”
    “You only get that smile when you’re talking to Brian. What are you doing out here anyway?”
    “Grandpa Tom kicked me out when my phone went off for the third time. Said he wasn’t going to die in the five minutes it took for me to answer it.” The tinted doors open with a pneumatic hiss, and the glassy-eyed receptionist nods at them as they turn toward the elevators. There are couches and coffee tables and, for some reason, potted poinsettias in the reception area; the ceiling goes three stories up to a skylight but still the room is dingy, the furniture trying and failing to look homey. There’s a litter of outdated magazines across the tables, and everything smells like orange furniture polish and dust.
    “I didn’t think you were allowed them in here, because of the pacemakers and things. Do you think Grandpa’s figured it out?”
    “Maybe. It’s not like he’d say anything.” Mitch met Brian at service camp two summers before, building houses for poor people in Appalachia in between praying and singing hymns. They’d stayed in contact over the winter, phoning and meeting up every so often, then went again to the same service campthe next summer. He’d come home with the smile, a smile Sally had never seen before, and though he kept it put away most of the time it always popped out when he’d been talking to Brian, or talking about Brian, or sometimes for no reason at all when he was sitting still and thinking. Their mother still points out pretty girls at mass and asks him if he doesn’t want to date more, and their father tells her to leave him be, Mitch is a good, responsible boy that others would do to take notes from, Pierce being one. Sally suspects that he plans on getting through his entire life without ever bringing up the fact that he’s just not interested in girls that way.
    The elevator smells like vomit, Lysol, and cold medicine, and Sally mashes the button to the third floor until the door rumbles closed. As they lurch upward, her stomach is left somewhere in the lobby. She leans back on her hands on the waist-high handrail that runs along the wall, then kicks her feet up onto the one catty-cornered across from her and suspends herself above the antiseptic floor. Elevators make her nervous. Rest homes make her nervous; they’re too much like hospitals, which also make her nervous. She