Labor Day Read Free

only one who felt concerned, actually. I had a feeling I should be doing something about the situation, but as usual, didn’t know what. And Frankseemed so calm and clear about things, you wanted to go along with him. Even though really, he was going along with us, of course.
    I have a sixth sense when it comes to people, he told my mother. I took one look around that store, big as it was, and knew you were the one.
    I won’t lie to you, he said. It’s a difficult situation. Many people would not want to have anything to do with me at this point. I’m going on my instincts here that you are a very understanding person.
    The world is not an easy place to get along, he said. Sometimes you just need to stop everything, sit down and think. Collect your thoughts. Lie low for a bit.
    I looked at my mother then. We were coming down Main Street now, past the post office and the drugstore, the bank, the library. All the old familiar places, though in all the times I’d passed this way before, it was never in the company of anyone like Frank. He was pointing out to my mother now that it sounded as if the rotors on her brakes might be a little thin. If he could get his hands on a few tools, he’d like to take a look at that for her, he said.
    In the seat next to her, I studied my mother’s face, to see if her expression changed, when Frank said these things. I could feel my heart beating, and a tightness in my chest—not fear exactly, but something close, though oddly pleasurable. I had it when my father took Richard and the baby and me, and Marjorie, to Disney World, and we got into our seats on the Space Mountain ride—all of us but Marjorie and the baby. Partly I wanted to get out before the ride started, but then they turned out the lights and this music started and Richard had poked me and said, If you have to barf, just do it in the other direction.
    Today is my lucky day, Frank said. Yours too, maybe.

    I knew right then, things were about to change. We were headed into Space Mountain now, into a dark place where the ground might give way, and you wouldn’t even be able to tell anymore where this car was taking you. We might come back. We might not.
    If this had occurred to my mother, she didn’t let on. She just held the wheel and stared straight ahead same as before, all the way home.

CHAPTER 2
    W HERE WE LIVED THEN—THE TOWN OF Holton Mills, New Hampshire—was the kind of place where people know each other’s business. They’d notice if you left your grass too long between one lawn mowing and the next, and if you painted your house some color besides white, they might not say anything to your face, but they’d talk about it. Where my mother was the kind of person who just wanted to be left alone. There had been a time when she loved being up on a stage, with everybody watching her perform, but at this point, my mother’s goal was to be invisible, or as close as she could get.
    One of the things she said she liked about our house was where it sat, at the end of the street, with no other houses beyond us and a big field in back, opening onto nothing but woods. Cars hardly ever came by, except on those occasions where someone missed the place they meant to go and had toturn around. Other than people like the man raising money for the orphanage, and the occasional religious types, or someone with a petition, hardly anyone ever came to see us, which to my mother was good news.
    It used to be different. We used to visit people’s houses sometimes and invite people to ours. But by this point, my mother was down to basically one friend, and even that one hardly ever came by anymore. Evelyn.
     
    M Y MOTHER AND E VELYN MET UP around the time my father left, when my mother had this idea to start a creative movement class for children at our house—the sort of activity it would have been hard to picture her getting into, later. She actually did things like put up flyers around town and buy an ad in the local paper. The