Even Now Read Free

tonight?” he said, wandering from the room.
    I knelt before the bookcases. At least these were easily packed items, easily chosen or disposed. There were few volumes I
     couldn’t live without, and some that were downright embarrassing. To go were the books I hadn’t read but meant to. To throw
     away were the encyclopedias, made obsolete by on-line information and out-of-date before I’d even been born. They’d originally
     belonged to my mother, and though as a schoolgirl I shunned the volumes, with their black embossed covers and flimsy yellow
     pages, Mother maintained that as long as Abraham Lincoln stayed dead, the set was perfectly fine. I’d longed for a set like
     the O’Connors’, luscious red-and-blue
Encyclopedia Britannica
with glazed pages and colored illustrations bought from a door-to- door salesman. Out too went dog-eared copies of
Sweet Savage Love
and
The Flame and the Flower.
A coffee table book on interior decorating. Nor would I need Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
any longer, I thought with a twinge for myself and for Ceel.
    Pushed behind the taller books, the way my children used to destroy the neat shelving during library visits, was a small paperback
     that stopped me. Titled
Letters to Karen,
the cover pictured a young woman whose face was hidden by falling, golden-lit hair, madonnalike. The book had been a premarital
     counseling gift from my minister. I fanned the stiff pages bound within an un-cracked spine, wondering if Hal too had failed
     to read his corresponding volume,
Letters to Phillip,
and what had become of it. “You hang on to things too long,” Ceel has told me, and true to form, I boxed it with gardening
     volumes, ones in which I could finally consult the cool-weather chapters.
    Ellen came in as I was leafing through a yearbook, and I beckoned to her. “Come over here. I need a you fix,” I said, family
     shorthand for a hug. She leaned over my shoulder, arms around my neck, enclosing me in her sweet scent of shampoo and skin.
    “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing.
    I laughed. “Me.”
    “You look awful.”
    I couldn’t argue. My ninth-grade smile was obliterated by braces, the most obvious feature in a face half-hidden by chin-length
     hair. “My best friend told me a thousand times that parting my hair in the middle looked terrible, but I didn’t listen to
     her.”
    “What are those stripes on the sides?” Ellen asked.
    “I slept in bobby pins so my hair would curl, and all I got was those dents.”
    My daughter’s fingers traveled down the page. “But someone scratched out your name and put Angela.”
    “My friend did that, too. She was making fun of me.”
    “Weren’t you mad at her?”
    “Oh no. When we were little girls playing pretend-like, I always wanted to be called Angela instead of Hannah. She could do
     a perfect English accent, like Mary Poppins. Ahn-je-luh,” I imitated.
    Ellen giggled appreciatively. “I like your name.”
    I turned to kiss the smooth cheek warm against my own. “Thank God for small favors.”
    “Let me see her picture.”
    “Who?”
    “The friend.” I obediently flipped to the Os. “Her hair looks good,” Ellen said.
    “Yes.” I sighed. “It always did.”
    “I would’ve hidden if I were you,” Ellen said with nine-year-old confidence and four-year-old tactlessness.
    I laughed. “In a way I did. I went to a different school the next year.” Seeing an opportunity, I seized it. “Like you are.
     Where your daddy will be a
teacher.”
    “Was she your best friend?” Ellen persisted.
    “Yes, she was.”
    “Did you cut yourselves and press your fingers together? Were you best friends like that?”
    “Oh no. We didn’t have to prove anything. We just . . . knew. Like you and Lila.”
    Ellen’s brow creased. “Lila says she’ll write to me, but she said that when she went to camp and never did.”
    “Don’t hold that against her. It doesn’t mean you aren’t still friends. Sometimes people mean to