The Other Side of the Bridge Read Free Page A

sawmill? A sorry bunch of stores lined up along a dusty main street, with nothing in them anyone would want to buy. A couple of churches. The Hudson’s Bay Company. A post office. A bank. Harper’s Restaurant. Ben’s Bar. A hotel—because, incredibly, some people chose to come to Struan for their holidays—and a little clutch of holiday cottages down by the lake. The lake was the town’s only asset, in Ian’s opinion. It was large—fifty miles long, north to south, and almost twenty miles across—and deep, and very clear, surrounded on all sides by low granite hills studded with spruce and wind-blasted pines. Its shore was so ragged with bays and inlets and islands that you could spend your life exploring and never find half of them. When Ian dreamed of leaving the town, which he did all the time nowadays, the thought of leaving the lake was the only thing that bothered him. The lake and Laura Dunn.
    He parked his bike up against the veranda of the house, climbed the wide wooden steps to the porch, and went in. The door to his father’s office was closed and he could hear voices behind it, but the waiting room was empty, so Ian sat down on one of the dozen or so battered old chairs lining the walls and flicked through a two-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest while he thought about Laura Dunn. The way strands of her hair escaped from their elastic band and drifted around her face. Those shadowed eyes. Her breasts. He’d noticed—he couldn’t help noticing—that on the front of her dress there had been two wet circles where her breasts had leaked milk.
    The door to the office opened and Ted Pickett, owner of Pickett’s Hardware, came out with his arm in a sling. He nodded at Ian and grimaced and Ian grimaced back. Patients entered the house by a side door but both the office and the waiting room were right off the hall, so all his life he’d been used to seeing people going in and out in varying degrees of anguish, and he’d got his responses down pat.
    “He doesn’t think it’s broken,” Mr. Pickett said.
    “That’s lucky,” Ian said.
    “He thinks it’s just sprained. Hurts like hell though.”
    Ian nodded sympathetically. “Did you fall off the ladder?” There was a ladder on wheels in the hardware store that Mr. Pickett scooted around on, reaching for nails or nuts or brackets or hinges, an accident waiting to happen.
    “Yeah,” Mr. Pickett said, looking surprised. “How did you know?”
    “I just…kind of…wondered,” Ian said politely.
    When Mr. Pickett left he knocked on his father’s door and went in.
    “I’ve got a job,” he said. His father had his back to him. He was rolling bandages and placing them neatly back in their drawer. His desk was littered with papers—patients’ notes, medical journals, bills—but the tools of his trade were always properly put away.
    “That was quick,” he said.
    “Arthur Dunn’s farm,” Ian said. “He said I could start Saturday.”
    His father turned around and took off his glasses and blinked at him. “Arthur Dunn’s farm?”
    “Yes, you know…doing…farm work.”
    “Farm work.” His father nodded vaguely, as if trying to imagine it.
    “I thought I’d like something outdoors,” Ian said.
    Dr. Christopherson put his glasses back on and looked out the window. It had just started to rain. “Yes,” he said doubtfully. “Well…if that’s what you want. Arthur’s a nice fellow.” He looked dubiously at Ian. “It’ll be hard work, you know.”
    “I know,” Ian said.
    “Did you see the horses?”
    “Yes.”
    “Magnificent animals.”
    “Yes,” Ian said, though he had barely noticed them. He and his father smiled at each other, glad to be in agreement. They were usually in agreement, unlike Ian and his mother.
    Next he went and told his mother, who was watching I Love Lucy in the living room. Television had finally—finally!—reached Struan a couple of months earlier, proof, if more were needed, of how backward things