Did You Ever Have A Family Read Free Page A

clean whatever careful scribble she had made there. She remembers Lolly’s screaming—piercing, wild, indignant—and how she refused to be consoled or touched. It would be over a year before Lolly would allow that friend back for a playdate. Even young, her daughter held grudges.
    June closes her eyes and imagines the wind-blasted car as an Etch A Sketch hurtling forward, the rough air wiping her clean. She hears that particular sound of shaken sand against plastic and metal, and momentarily the trick works. Her mind empties. The imagined roadside calamities and their self-pitying culprits vanish. Even Lolly—tear-streaked and furious—disappears.
    June settles deeper into her seat and slows the car just below the speed limit. She passes a farm stand, a newish CVS where a video store once stood, miles of crumbling stone walls, and a dusty white house with the same pink-painted sign in front that has been there for as long as she can remember, CRYSTALS stenciled in pale blue underneath black letters that spell ROCK SHOP . For years, these were the things she saw on this drive—each marking the distance between the two lives that had for so long passed as one. She tries again to summon the Etch A Sketch—this time to erase the memory of all the giddy Friday-afternoon flights from the city and the too-soon Sunday-evening returns with Lolly in the backseat, Adam in front, driving too fast, as always, and June pivoting between them, talking about teachers and coaches at school, which movie to see that night, what to eat. Those car rides flew by and were the least complicated part of their lives. The memory of them steals her breath, surprises her with an ache for a time she almost never remembers fondly. If it could only have been as simple as that: the three of them in a car, heading home.
    The river disappears from view and she slows the car to 20 as she approaches the half-mile stretch that everyone who travels this road regularly knows is a speed trap. She crosses from Kent into New Milford and passes the McDonald’s she has long considered the unofficial border between country and suburb. In the parking lot, children climb from the open doors of a dark green van like clowns out of a circus car and stand restlessly before a row of elaborate motorcycles parked in front. A young man jogs beyond them, a sturdy chocolate Lab keeping perfect pace by his side. They cross in front of an old gas station, boarded up and empty, the pumps removed. June remembers stopping there twice, maybe three times, in the years she’s been driving this road but cannot remember its going out of business. Weeds have sprung up in the cracked pavement of its parking lot, and she notices the Lab circle a scruffy bunch of dandelionsand grass, on which he lifts his leg and pees. His master jogs patiently in place a few yards away.
    The light ahead blinks red and she slows to a halt behind another Subaru wagon, this one dark green, newer, and filled with what appear to be teenagers. She avoids looking at them and instead focuses on the blue Connecticut license plate and the Nantucket-ferry stickers peeling on the back window. A siren signaling noon sounds from a nearby fire station. It starts low and soft, like a French horn, and builds gradually to a high, wide wail so loud and overwhelming she covers her ears with the thin linen sleeves of her coat. The light finally turns green, and as it does, she closes all the windows. The bus driver behind her taps his horn—once, politely—and she eases her foot from the brake until the car begins to roll forward.
    The siren dies. The air inside the car is still again. She passes restaurants and clothing stores and supermarkets she’s driven past for decades but never entered. OPEN signs hang from windows, garlands of tiny, multicolored flags snap in the wind above a Cadillac dealership. Through the rearview mirror she watches it all get smaller.

Edith
    They wanted daisies in jelly jars. Local daisies in