Even Now Read Free Page B

Hal said.
    “Just about.”
    “Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to go to bed without closure.”
    Hal teased me about my need for closure, a term that, like the brick sidewalk, I’d never known existed before it was pointed
     out to me. It was true, though; I couldn’t help it. I liked things tidied and completed. Open-ended decisions and circumstances
     left me floundering.
    “Just think,” I said softly. “This time tomorrow we’ll be watching the sun set over the mountains.”
    From beyond the treetops, beyond our neighborhood, floated the familiar summer sounds of organ chords and muffled loudspeaker
     voice from the baseball stadium downtown. In two weeks the sound would change tempo and direction as a high school band began
     its nightly marching and practicing on the athletic fields in preparation for football season.
    “You never hear children playing after-supper games anymore,” I said.
    “After-supper games?”
    “Red Light, Giant Steps, Mother May I.” A game called merely School, in which a small pebble was passed, or pretended to be,
     from one pair of prayer-clasped hands to another. Evening noises in Cullen weren’t insect zappers and baseball announcers,
     but the calls of children and bobwhites. As he challenged me to make my bed tight enough to bounce a dime, my father would
     sit on the stoop and challenge me to count the bobwhite calls. “Listen,” he’d whisper with cocked head, “they say their name,”
     then whistle his own identical three-note plaint:
bob bob white.
    “Sad?” Hal asked, clasping my knee. “Melancholy baby?”
    The chill stripe of his wedding band warmed against my skin. “You know, this spring was the first spring in five years that
     cardinals didn’t build a nest in the smilax.”
    He gasped. “My God. Shunned by the birds. Good thing we’re leaving.”
    “It’s not that simple, Hal.” But I smiled with him; after seventeen years of dailiness you know what can’t be explained, know
     that the insufficiencies of love can’t be punished. I leaned my head to his shoulder. If I was sad, it wasn’t about leaving.
     “Moving gets a bad rap in movies and stories. Packing is always associated with some kind of sadness. Change, flight, departure,
     death. This is different. This is hopeful. I feel as though I’m returning, not leaving. Going back to something I’ve always
     known.”
    “How philosophical of you.”
    I looked to see whether Hal was mocking me and decided it didn’t matter. “Maybe a little sad,” I admitted. “Sad to leave the
     driveway where I spent so many hours watching Mark and Ellen drive their Big Wheels.”
    “I don’t think it’s the driveway or the Big Wheels you’re missing,” Hal said, touching his bottle to mine. After a moment
     he added, “It isn’t permanent, Hannah.”
    I didn’t answer him. There is something attractive and irresistible in a limited arrangement, a plan with predetermined closure.
     Perfect job, perfect house, perfect small town. A perfectly clear path toward rediscovering lost simplicity, or whatever it
     was I’d lost. The move to Rural Ridge seemed ordained, fated. It had been a Sunday when Ceel called, and the eve of our leaving
     was a Sunday again. A godsend all around.
    And thus does He arrange to give us what we want.

From Hannah’s quote book:
    . . . the past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which people of sensibility are visited at odd
     hours.
    —Henry James
Chapter 2
    H ope the good stuff isn’t gone,” Ceel said as we climbed from her car. “I have six vases to fill and need a dozen tomatoes.”
     She and Ben were hostessing a casual get-together for Hal and me that night.
    “A foot-long sub is Mark’s idea of perfect party food.”
    “It ain’t only for you, honey,” Ceel drawled. “Don’t be offended by the double billing, but I’m entertaining our new interim
     minister and his wife, too. Wait till you see St.