Read Online All the Way Home by Wendy Corsi Staub - Free Book Online Page B

She’d been a college student then, an art major at Buff State, and dazzled over the opportunity to study watercolor technique with Marcel du Bois, one of the world’s greatest living painters. When she’d left Lake Charlotte in May, she’d been reluctant to go so far from home—from her mother and Lou, whom she’d been dating for a few years by then. But how could an aspiring artist stay homesick for very long in Paris?
    August had arrived much too soon, and her instructor had encouraged her to stay, telling her she had a rare talent and he’d like to keep working with her. Praise from the great du Bois never came easily, and Michelle had actually hesitated, albeit briefly, before telling him that she had to get home. Back to Lake Charlotte and Lou, for a brief week together before she went back to Buffalo and he left for Long Island, where he would enter his first year of law school.
    Now she remembers how much they’d argued during those fleeting days together. Lou seemed to have changed over the summer; he was no longer his happy-go-lucky self. Part of that might have been due to the summer job he’d taken to pay his law school tuition—working on the new sewer line the town was building out on High Ridge Road. Great money, but who would be thrilled with the long, grueling hours in the heat of summer? Certainly not Lou, who had been a lifeguard out at the Curl beach every summer since he was sixteen.
    But Michelle had known the job wasn’t the only miserable thing about Lou’s summer. He resented her for leaving for three months; he’d even tried to talk her out of going to Paris before she left. And once she was back, it seemed as though all he did was gripe about all the great times they could have had together, making her feel guilty for ruining his summer. She had half expected Lou to break up with her that fall, but when they saw each other again at Thanksgiving, he was his old self again.
    A month later, he gave her an engagement ring for Christmas. In January, she transferred to a state school on Long Island and finished her degree there. Lou talked her into changing her major to elementary education so that she could teach art, pointing out that she could hardly expect to build a career as a painter. Lou had always been practical. And she was always a dreamer.
    Still am, she tells herself now with a faint smile as she spirals a bit more red paint onto her paper. She watches Ozzie mix a splotch of red with blue to make purple, and wonders whether he inherited her artistic talent. Too early to tell.
    “Good, Ozzie,” she tells him. “That’s purple. See? Red and blue make purple.”
    “Purple. Like Barney.”
    “Like Barney,” she echoes, smiling.
    She and Ozzie work quietly, she with careful strokes and he in slapdash toddler style, and she’s lost in her memories of the past . She remembers the crummy one-bedroom apartment she and Lou rented in Smithtown after they were married, and how she worked two waitressing jobs to support them as Lou struggled through law school. He had terrible study habits—he liked to be active, out playing sports or hanging around with friends, rather than sitting in a chair poring over texts and notes.
    Still, he graduated and managed to pass the bar—on the third try—then landed a job with a small practice in their hometown. He had hoped to settle in New York City with a high-profile firm, but Michelle refused, wanting to be near her widowed mother. As an only child, she felt obligated.
    Thank God Lou finally gave in on that one. At least I had a few years with Mom before she died. And if we hadn’t lived with her and saved money, we would never have been able to afford this place, she thinks, looking up at the back of the big house.
    Pretty soon, the shady spot where she and Ozzie are sitting at the picnic table will be encompassed by the new family room. The yard will still be a good size, though, she concludes, glancing around. It stretches quite a distance