Extraordinary Read Free

bills from the local hardware store, even Christmas cards that had gotten lost for six months. I’d start off full of hope, there’d be all this stuff, but then there’d be five letters left, then three, then none, and I’d go through the pile again as though maybe I’d missed it.
    â€œBut never a letter. Once, I even waved down the car as it pulled away. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing for me?’ The father said, ‘Well, let’s take another look.’ And he did. ‘Maybe tomorrow, Sally,’ he said.
    â€œIt was the longest walk back to the house—a hot day, cicadas roaring, those big pointless fields and nothing to look forward to. I let the screen door bang behind me. My grandmother said, ‘Sally, don’t let that door bang, it scares the willies out of me.’
    â€œI went back into my bedroom and lay down on the bed, the wallpaper with little wooden rocking chairs on it, the yellow fields outside. I thought, I’ve got to
do
something, read a book or write in my diary or play some records, and I kept thinking my way through it: open up the record box, take out a forty-five, put it on the record player and start it up. But it just seemed like too much work. Everything did. Everything seemed
exhausting.
I just lay there till supper.
    â€œI never found out what the trouble was. He just vanished.”
    â€œAnd your mother? Where was your mother,
our
mother, while all this was going on?”
    â€œShe was around. At her convenience, of course. Sometimes she’d come by in a grey car with a big grille with flies stuck in it and take me to the Tastee Freeze in town for a hamburger—it was a ritual we had—and then she’d take me for a long drive on backcountry roads, let me light her cigarettes for her. She was a great talker. A good listener too, to be fair—as long as you said what she wanted to hear.
    â€œOn one of these drives, just as it was getting dark and we were heading back to my grandfather’s, I told her about Terry Blanchard, about that night he tumbled into my bed. It wasn’t a confession, it was just that talking about it was as close as I could get to doing it again.”
    â€œAnd what did she say?”
    â€œShe asked me if I felt better now that I’d talked about it. And I said yes. And then she said something that I have never forgotten. She said, ‘You’re going to feel good about all this for a while and then later, when I’m gone and you’re alone again and the excitement of talking about it has worn off, you’re going to go back to feeling the way you did before. And that’s normal. Just remember that that’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Then she told me about going out on a date with a Hollywood movie star when she was just nineteen.”
    â€œWho was it?”
    â€œI think it was Errol Flynn. She claimed to not know this from personal experience, but someone had told her his dink was so big he had to strap it to his leg. It made me laugh. A funny story to hear from your mother. But I don’t know. You could never be sure with her. She told me she wrote a short story for the
New Yorker
once, too. But I never saw it. Maybe she did. But I doubt it.”
    â€œThe
New Yorker
? That’s a pretty tall order.”
    â€œIt certainly is.”
    â€œAnd was she right?” I asked.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œAbout how you were going to feel later.”
    â€œShe was. After she left, I kept looking at the clock. An hour later, I was still fine, happy even. Two hours later, same thing. But then later, after dinner, I was watching television with my grandfather, and I could feel things starting to darken again. It was as if some kind of poison was slowly creeping into my body, like some awful
leak
, and the whole good feeling I’d had with my mother just slipped away. I couldn’t concentrate on the TV show, it was like the