Desire Lines Read Free Page B

Kathryn’s mother reaches over and squeezes her knee. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
She tries to pull her thoughts together. “It’s funny being back.”
“But you were just here a year ago.”
“Not like this. Cowed and humiliated.”
“Oh, Kathryn.” Her mother laughs. “You’re so dramatic. You should’ve pursued a career on the stage.”
“I should’ve pursued a career, period.”
Her mother purses her lips and looks at Kathryn sideways, cocking her head like a bird. Then she reaches out and touches her daughter’s hand, where the gold ring shines on her finger. “You’re still wearing this.”
Kathryn retracts her hand.
“Don’t you want to put it away?”
“One of these days.”
“Closure is very important, sweetheart.”
“All right, Mom. I’ll get rid of it when I’m ready.”
Her mother pauses, running her hands around the rim of the steering wheel. “You have to get on with it, Kathryn,” she says finally. “Put that part of your life behind you. I know it’s difficult, but—”
“I hear you,” she says sharply.
The light turns green, and they drive along in silence. Kathryn watches the neighborhoods drift by, clusters of small white houses built in the thirties and forties shaded by leafy green trees, hanging low and full in the summer heat.
“You must be tired,” her mother says in a clipped voice.
“Look, Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.”
Her mother shrugs, a peacemaking gesture. “I was pressuring you.”
“No, it’s me. I’m just not handling this very well.”
“There’s no reason you should be,” her mother says. She smiles. “I am glad you’re home.”
“Me, too,” Kathryn says. She’s not sure she is, but she says it anyway.
KATHRYN’S MOTHER STILL lives in the house that Kathryn grew up in, a white colonial with black shutters in a section of town called Little City, a residential neighborhood of oaks and maples surrounding a large rectangular island of green, well-kept park. The most impressive houses in Little City are great white confections with elegant slate roofs and full-length windows that line a broad street sloping down toward the river. The Campbell house, several blocks over, is modest in comparison. When Kathryn was growing up, their neighbors were young families and retired couples who puttered together in their flower gardens on summer mornings and sat on clean-swept porches all afternoon, alternately dozing and keeping a lookout for trouble. Not that there was any; the closest Taft Street came to excitement was when two men moved into a house together and built a deck, visible from the street, where they sunbathed in Speedos and massaged each other with tanning oil.
Like most houses in the neighborhood, the Campbells’ was built in the twenties. It has a deep wooden porch, large living and dining room windows, and an original cedar-and-red-brick fireplace. When the Campbells first moved to Bangor from Boston, Kathryn would sit on the wooden porch swing in midafternoon and close her eyes, breathing in the clean pine scent of the hedges separating their property from the next-door neighbors’, listening to the muted hum and swish of cars going by on Center Street, a block away. Sometimes her mother would come out on the porch and sit down on the swing with her, rocking back and forth with her foot. After a while she’d say, “You know, Kath, this is exactly how I grew up. Sitting on a porch swing, waiting for something to happen. Just sitting and waiting. Exactly like this.”
Kathryn has heard all the stories, all the family lore. Her grandfather, John Lefebvre, a French Canadian, migrated to Maine in 1928 because he’d been told that anybody who works hard in America can become a success. As it turned out, in his case the hard work consisted of marrying Kathryn’s grandmother, Alice, the caustic daughter of a wealthy Bangorbanker, and becoming an apprentice to her father, who eventually passed on all of his