The Silver Bough Read Free Page A

doesn’t replace the missing part, and eventually has to be peeled away and discarded. He was a nice guy and deserved better, but knowing that made her no less cold. “I need time to think. I need to get away from everything for a while.”
    “Including me. I see.” His shoulders sagged; he looked as if he would crumple and fall forward, grabbing on to her for support, but he stood up, steadying himself by resting his knuckles against the table where their two drinks waited, still untouched and sweating onto the pale Formica. “If it’d been me who’d died, I bet you wouldn’t have dumped your best friend like this.”
    She caught her breath. “
She
wouldn’t have tried to make me feel guilty if I needed to leave.”
    “So I make you feel guilty?” He groaned. “Is that supposed to make me feel worse, or better? I can’t win, can I?”
    “No, you can’t. I’m sorry, Brandon.”
    She’d expected to have a much harder time getting her parents to accept her decision; they’d always been so firm about the importance of college. For the first month she was home she worked hard at two jobs, at Kinko’s in the daytime and in the evenings as a waitress at Chili’s, and scarcely had time to talk to her parents. When it finally came out that she didn’t intend to return to school in the fall, she was surprised by how calmly they took it.
    “Only for a year,” she said quickly. “I just want a year off, to think about things and…well, I’d like to do some painting. Maybe I could take an art course somewhere.”
    “You were thinking of staying here?” asked her mother.
    “Yeah…if that’s all right. I mean, you weren’t planning to rent out my room, were you?”
    “The thought crossed our minds,” said her dad with a straight face. “But then I thought of how much it would cost to put all your things in storage and decided against it. But wouldn’t you rather go somewhere else? Travel?”
    She stared at him in surprise. “Well…yes. That’s kind of what I’m saving up for…”
    “I’ve got enough frequent flyer miles to get you to Scotland.”
    She wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “To get
me
to Scotland?”
    “You’d like to see where your grandmother grew up, wouldn’t you? You could take pictures. Maybe even solve the mystery of why she left.”
    “Paint the Scottish landscape,” suggested her mother.
    “The Walkers would be happy to put you up. After you’ve tasted the delights of Appleton you could check out the museums and galleries in Glasgow and Edinburgh.”
    “You can be our advance scout. Tell us what to see and what to avoid—because we are definitely going next year.”
    It was completely unexpected, and, unexpectedly, she decided it was perfect: exactly what she needed. A complete break from the world she knew, yet with relatives to provide a link. Investigating her grandmother’s past would give her a project to work on, supplying a reason to be there instead of somewhere else.
    Now she gazed out the window at the famously beautiful Loch Lomond. She remembered learning a song about it in elementary school: a lifetime ago, in another century. The scenery beyond the bus window belonged to an even more distant past; it looked like something in a movie, and she felt rather as if she was watching one now, as if this bus was a theme park ride, and everything outside created to give pleasure. It was even her favorite kind of weather, cool, cloudy, and mysterious, with the tops of the hills—or were they mountains?—hidden in low cloud.
    The road narrowed and began to wind through the craggy heights. The bus slowed and grumbled with effort. Her ears popped.
    Some of the slopes were barren landscapes, the huge boulders jutting out of the thin soil reminding her of an illustration from a geology textbook. She decided they were definitely too steep to be hills, so must be mountains, the first she’d ever seen in real life. Hardy shrubs and tough grasses sprouted between the