Read Online Dreaming August by Terri-Lynne Defino - Free Book Online Page B

real so badly it made her teeth ache. Since Augie first tapped her shoulder, she had something to look forward to again. Weird, perhaps, but Benny once prided herself on weird. Was he real? Or was he wishful thinking gone haywire?
    “Augie?”
    “Yes, Benedetta?”
    “I need something. Something physical.”
    “If I could do that for you, cara mia , I would be happy to oblige, but as far as I know, such a thing is not possible.”
    Benny bit the insides of her cheeks again. “You are a fiend.”
    “I think you like fiends.”
    She used to. Now she liked…
    She cut off the thought before it fully formed. “I meant something physical as proof I’ve not lost my mind completely. Everything happening, even talking to you now, could be memory forcing itself out of my head. The woods right there”—she pointed beyond the wrought iron fence—“is where Henny kissed me for the first time. Maybe that’s where I got your name from. Maybe I saw it all those years ago and now my grief is pulling it out of my brain. I need to know you’re not a figment of my imagination.”
    “Sure, sure. Any ideas?”
    “I was hoping you’d have one.”
    Benny paced, keeping the sense of him ever in her periphery. Perhaps because it was getting dark, there was something different in the glow she imagined him to be, tempting her to look. Was that shadow the faded image of an elbow? The slope of a hip? She squeezed her eyes shut tight. “You said you lived in Bitterly for forty years, right?”
    “More or less.”
    “Did you do anything noteworthy that might have made the papers? Win some prize at the Fourth of July picnic, or save a puppy from drowning or something?”
    “No, nothing like that.”
    “Hmm, well, maybe you took out a permit to put up a shed or something I could look up in the town records?”
    “Permit for a shed? Ha! Benedetta, you could build a whole house in this town back then without a permit, and there were no building codes. I should know. I built my house from…”
    “Augie?” She shielded her eyes as she spun to where she last heard his voice. “Are you there?”
    “I am,” he said. “I just remembered something, and if it’s still there, it will give you the proof you wish.”
    * * * *
    Benny switched the headlight of her scooter off as she rounded the corner of Division Street. When Bitterly was first founded, and the Green sat closer to the river, Division Street marked the middle between the northern and southern ends of town. Commerce wisely moved to higher ground after the annual flooding in 1855 devastated the town one time too many, taking the Green and municipal buildings with it. Now it was a strange name for a road out in the middle of nowhere, and clutching the past too determinedly to let go.
    Three of the original structures survived—Bitterly Congregational Church, the Bossy House and the Weller house. Benny wondered if Augie’s Katherine was one of the Wellers. Considering she and Augie had built their home on the same street as the original family homestead, she figured she must have been.
    Benny’s stomach flipped. Of all the houses in Bitterly, why did the one Augie build have to be 105 Division Street? Why couldn’t it even have been one hundred eight, or two-eleven? Nope. One. O. Five.
    Evelyn Taylor’s house.
    Dan’s sister.
    With whom he lived since her husband skipped town four years ago.
    Of course, it was the house Augie built back in 1935. More proof it was all in her head. Benedetta, you idiot.
    But she glided to a stop at the bottom of the drive, parked the scooter and took off her helmet anyway. During the week she stole from Dan, she had never once been in the house. Benny could count on one hand the number of times she had been on Division Street in her life. At least there was that in her favor if she found what Augie had sent her to find.
    She skirted the shadows along the driveway, hunkered down behind the big rock with the house numbers on it. There were only