Read Online Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault - Free Book Online

bed anymore. I loved her smell—Prell shampoo and beer and a little bit of something else I’m pretty sure I’d recognize immediately if I ever got to smell it again.
    I wondered what it would be like to be there with her every night. I wondered if I lived with her, if I’d ever tell her I was too old to be put to bed, or just let her do it. Let her till I was very old—till I was a teenager, even. Beautiful Shelly could put me to bed as long as she wanted. Young, beautiful Shelly who didn’t seem any older than that girl Kelly my mom (Linda) had sit for me on the rare occasions when she and Dad went for a movie.
    And before Shelly got up and turned out the light, did I really look at her? If I could do it again, what would I look for in her face, in her eyes?
    And if I had it to go back to, what would I say to her?
    Probably this: “Shelly, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
    I suppose the answer to this and any other question is irrelevant now, since it wouldn’t change anything.
    So maybe only this: “Shelly, say one more thing to me. Just one more thing—anything—before you turn out the light. Just one more thing, between you and me.”
    So Gretchen had reverted back to writing about Dolly Parton rather than sticking to the male artists. I wondered if she found herself doing that often, and how she planned to justify it in the final draft.
    In all of the years I knew Gretchen, she never said as much about Shelly as she’d written here in this piece. And for some reason, I’d been under the impression that Shelly had died when Gretchen was four or five—that she didn’t talk about her because she didn’t really remember her. If Gretchen was old enough to read before Shelly died—old enough to think she was too old to be put to bed, old enough to remember later that she’d watched Mr. Belvedere —she had to be a couple of years older than that.
    “How’re you feeling, Jamie?” my boss, Patty, asked me when she caught me staring into space at my desk.
    She said it with a hint of irritation. I could tell she’d grown tired of having to ask me this weeks ago, when I’d returned from my second hospital stay for dehydration.
    “Great!” I said, returning my gaze to my computer. Exuberance and positivity always seemed to throw Patty, so I’d taught myself to feign them when necessary.
    Patty anchored her thick pink hands on my desk and leaned into my personal space. I think she was checking to see if I had Facebook or a game of solitaire on my screen.
    “Um. Have you got Warren’s article on the sewer bill?”
    I could smell her Altoid breath. I wondered if she’d popped one in her office just for the occasion of coming out here and harassing me. Flattering, in a way.
    “Yeah,” I said, glancing at the clock. It was just before nine. “I’ve just got to shave another few lines off it, and I’ll be done.”
    “Good.” Patty leaned away from me again, folding her arms and giving me a single nod. “Because Erin just filed a story about that fire on Chestnut, and I need that next. I’m putting it on page one, where the budget story was going to be.”
    “Alrighty,” I chirped. I could feel a couple of the reporters’ sympathetic eyes on me, which I tried to ignore.
    I finished my work early, but stayed late searching for articles on Gretchen on LexisNexis. I found some I hadn’t read before, but none of them said anything new. The police apparently weren’t releasing many details.
     
    On the way home, I thought about a long-ago conversation Gretchen and I had had in college—the conversation to which Gretchen had referred in her last e-mail to me.
    Gretchen had noticed that I seemed to get more mail than anyone else, and that I was always on the computer e-mailing this friend or that. In time she figured out that these weren’t all high school friends—there was Penny from volleyball camp when I was thirteen, and Tara, who was in my homeroom all the way through junior high,