The Road Taken Read Free

covered with soap bubbles, his damp hair, his happy giggle when they tickled him. He had become their charge, their child toy, and now he was all theirs. He clung to his two older sisters perhaps more than he should, but he was comforting them too. Their father didn’t criticize this because he didn’t even notice. He seemed in a haze somehow, distracted. Rose attributed this to grief, but she didn’t know how to make him happy, any more than she had known how to make her mother well.
    That summer her sister, Maude, had bloomed overnight into a beautiful young woman. The boys who had been her childhood playmates were now uncomfortable with her, liking her too much—although some of them had the courage to ask her out for a walk. How tense and confused and romantic these silly little afternoon dates were! A glimpse of ankle under a long skirt, the light brief touch of a gloved hand on an arm, and a boy’s neck could redden in a blush. Rose thought they were all idiots.
    But the other new development was that she herself had a boyfriend of her own, or sort of. In her fantasies Rose thought of him that way, even though she knew they were make-believe. Now that he had broken the ice, Tom Sainsbury smiled at Rose whenever he saw her in the neighborhood, and gave a little nod of recognition, and the thrill of that, of feeling chosen and grown-up, lasted for hours. She felt he was the best-looking boy in town. Tom Sainsbury was different from the boys who chased her sister, Maude; he was adult, casual, comfortable, a boy who had known sorrow, who understood girls.
    His father worked at the local boatyards, the Herreschoff Manufacturing Company, which made sailing yachts, steam launches, and U.S. Navy torpedo boats, and that summer Tom got a job there to learn the trade he intended to follow when he graduated from high school. He was helping to work on a yacht for the America’s Cup race. Sometimes Rose walked to the waterfront hoping to catch sight of him. He was fourteen now, and Rose supposed that in a few years he would have girlfriends his own age, and then he would eventually fall in love with one of them and get married. But for now, she kept on dreaming; it didn’t hurt anybody, no one knew. Sometimes she let herself dare to hope that he would wait for her.
    And now her father, Rose was beginning to notice, was no longer grieving. In fact, he was looking cheerful, and sometimes hummed a little tune under his breath. He had seemed to adjust to getting on with his life more quickly than Rose thought was proper.
    In the warm spring and summer evenings, after he had closed the butcher shop, and Mrs. Kisler had closed her bakery, their father would stroll down to her shop and walk her home. After a little while he began to take walks with her in the evenings after supper too, and then on Sundays after church. It was clear to everyone, even his children, that William Smith was courting Celia Kisler. And why not, people said. Celia was young enough to work hard, although of course she would prefer not to, and young enough to remarry and have more children, and certainly William’s children needed a mother; a man couldn’t do it all himself. Rose was horrified. She considered her father’s behavior a betrayal of their mother, and even of them.
    Mrs. Kisler’s son, Alfred, was the same age as Huey. The two boys knew each other from the neighborhood, but they had never been friends. Hugh played with the “good” boys, the docile and timid ones, and even, sometimes, with girls. Alfred played with the leaders. Even at their age, children were mean to each other. Rose knew that when the boys teased Hugh, Alfred sometimes did too. But now, because of their parents’ courtship, it was inevitable that the two families began to do things together: sometimes a Sunday dinner at Mrs. Kisler’s house, or a day at the beach having a picnic.
    “You mustn’t tease Hugh anymore,” Celia told Alfred. “Now you must defend him.”