Read Online Dive From Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer - Free Book Online Page A

I licked it and looked at him. “How are things at home?” I said after a while.
    He blushed again. “OK.”
    “Going to the hospital tonight?”
    He grimaced. “I have to work too late.” He put the scoop back in the water. “Are you?”
    I shook my head. It wasn’t something I’d decided against, but all at once I knew it was true: I wasn’t going to go, I couldn’t bear to go, and I felt terrified by the knowledge. What if I felt this way again tomorrow? And on and on?
    John was waiting for me to say something.
    “I just can’t get myself to,” I told him. “Do you know what I mean? I know I should. I know I should. But I just can’t.” I took a bite of ice cream, and suddenly tears massed in my eyes and then covered my cheeks, making the ice cream in my mouth feel painfully cold. John passed me a napkinacross the counter and I handed him my cone, then dried my face and blew my nose. Here they were at last, my first tears since the accident, and it was shocking how little I felt: just the tiniest easing.
    The door opened and a group of teenagers entered the store: boys in gigantic jeans cut off below the knee; girls in various examples of what I thought of as bra-strap dressing, tops and dresses that revealed the shoulder straps of black or light blue lingerie. “Eating on the job,” one of the boys said to John, and I recognized him as one of John’s friends.
    “What’s up,” John said. He was blushing again.
    “Ohhh,” said another of the boys.
    “Shut up.” John handed me my cone and busied himself wiping down the counters.
    The girls leaned against the ice cream case, ostensibly talking to each other but looking me over all the same. It was dispiriting to know I could pass for sixteen. I took a napkin from the dispenser and wrapped it around my cone. “Bye, John,” I said. “Thanks.”
    When I was at the door he called my name, and I turned back. “I do know what you meant before,” he said. “I do.”
    I waved and left. Walking by the wide glass windows, I saw the teenagers laughing and moving in to needle him. Then I felt the glow of Mike’s accident coming back, and I knew that in a moment their faces would fall, that the teasing would dissolve when they learned who I really was.
    When I got home it was a little after seven, and visiting hours were still on. Mrs. Mayer was probably there, wondering where I was, and when eight o’clock came I started waiting for the phone to ring, for her to say again, in that casual voice, “Could you stop by tomorrow?” But nine came, and then ten, and the phone never rang.
    The next day I had no trouble going. I got off work in the middle of the afternoon, and I went right over, spent an hour or so alone in the lounge and even got the full ten minutes for that hour in Mike’s room, with no one else wanting part of it. He was on his stomach, and as I stood there looking at his bare back, at the familiar scatter of freckles across his shoulders, I thought I was OK, I thought I’d be able to return and return, without any more moments like I’d had in front of John Junior.
    When I got home I fixed myself some iced cranberry juice and got ready to sew. I set up my machine and threaded it; I got out my iron, filled it with distilled water, and plugged it in; I took the fabric for my mother’skitchen curtains and set it in folded stacks on the table. But I couldn’t get to work, and the reason was Mike’s back.
    I kept seeing it. The pale skin and the freckles, the wiry hairs: all as familiar to me as parts of my own body. There was the broadness of his shoulders, the wide, wide span of his upper back. And he had a place a little lower down that was strangely sensitive: the slightest pressure on it made him flinch, but not in pain—more as if he’d been tickled or poked. I thought of that place and wondered if it had been affected neurologically by the accident, and all at once I was brought up short by the fact of what had happened to