Autumn Blue Read Free Page B

anyone bought the last vowel.
    He glanced at his watch and pushed up from his chair. “The mail should be here now.” He paused when he passed her to touch
     Rita’s soft red hair. “I’ll be good,” he promised, “as long as you don’t make me eat any more of that baby-puke squash.”

3
    S IDNEY AND HER FRIEND Micki steered their children through the crowded fairgrounds toward the livestock exhibits. Attending the Winger County Harvest
     Fair was an annual tradition, one Sidney couldn’t deny her daughters, though her heart was not in it, to say the least.
    Today her girls wore matching pink denim jackets that their grandmother had sent from Desert Hot Springs last Christmas. Sissy’s
     had a gray streak across the front from rubbing it against the corral fence where they had watched a friend from school run
     her pony through the barrel race. Andy, Micki’s nine-year-old son, led the way down a row of wooden stalls to the Goliath
     of the hogs, a huge mottled gray blimp with legs. It tried to push itself up from the straw where it was sprawled, then seemed
     to think better of it, falling back with a breathy grunt. The children began to clap and chant as cheerily as Richard Simmons’s
     disciples: “Get up! Come on; you can do it. Get up!”
    The sow pushed up on her haunches, holding that immodest pose while she contemplated her next move.
    Everyone laughed, including Sidney. “That’s why I don’t eat bacon,” she said. “Fat, fat, fat.”
    “Oh, like you’ve ever had an adipose cell in your entire body.” Micki held out her bag of popcorn but Sidney shook her head.
     Her perky blond friend looked great despite the garbage she continually consumed. The receptionist for Leon Schuman Insurance,
     she was known for keeping a stash of chocolate in her desk drawer at all times. They sat on hay bales in the middle of the
     barn, where they could see their children as they scrambled from stall to stall. “Now aren’t you glad you came? I told you
     it would do you good.”
    Sidney pulled a bottle of water out of her straw bag and took a swig, her eyes roving the crowd on the slight chance that
     Ty might be among them. A handsome dad with one child straddling his neck and another held by the hand leaned over a gate
     and began making hog sounds. People around them laughed and joined in, though the pig seemed unimpressed. Sidney sighed. “That’s
     what I want.”
    “What? A man who can grunt? They’re everywhere; trust me.”
    “A man who spends Saturday with the kids. Look at that little boy looking up at him. His dad is his hero—and all it takes
     is a little snorting. He doesn’t have to be in a rock band or send elaborate gifts to make up for all the visits that got
     postponed to some mysterious date in the future.” Sidney saw a vision of Tyson watching expectantly for his father from the
     living room window, fidgeting, flopping from sofa to chair to floor, same scenario but different face as the boy grew from
     an excited six-year-old to a preteen whose eyes had grown dull from atrophied hope. At some point he had wised up, forsaking
     his post at the window and aloofly pretending he didn’t care whether his father showed up or not. Sidney’s soul tore open
     every time it happened, while Ty’s heart had seemingly formed such thick scars from the repeated wounds that it had hardened
     into a clenched fist. The girls had never bonded with their father enough to care much.
    Sidney’s eyes began to flood again. She inhaled, filling her aching chest with the sweet scents of hay and cotton candy, forcing
     her eyes to focus on her daughters: Rebecca, a joyful and dramatic ten-year-old, thin and long-armed like her mother, and
     Sissy, still endowed with some cuddly baby fat, pushing eight.
    “Dodge is going to be shocked someday to see that the girls aren’t babies anymore,” Sidney said. “He still sends them baby
     dolls for Christmas, if he remembers at all. Do you know what he sent