Read Online Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham - Free Book Online

ass—put her in mind of continents.
    “I'll bet you were a charmer as a little boy,” she said. “I'll bet you were just about unbearably cute.” In fact, she could imagine him: stocky and sweet-tempered, almost ostentatiously cheerful, the kind of child who never gives anyone any trouble.
    He shrugged, pleased. He liked the myth of his own history. He liked its gentle curve.
    “And you,” he said, “were a princess. Right?”
    She smoothed his hair with her fingertips, kissed his lips. It was hard sometimes to know what story they were inventing together. Was she a bored princess from an exotic land come to shed her magical strangeness on the golf course and the Dairy Queen? Or was she the impoverished girl from the fairy tales, with just one chance in a billion?
    “Come on,” she said. “I have a feeling my father's waiting up tonight.”
    “Right,” he said. If he'd held her there another minute—if he'd said he didn't care about her father's life of rules and outrage—she might have started the long process of falling in love with him. But Todd's strength lay in doing perfectly all that was expected of him. He was known for his expansive, cheerful cooperation. He sometimes quoted Will Rogers: “I never met a man I didn't like.”
    They folded up the blanket and walked in silence across the sloped expanse of the fourteenth hole. Todd encircled Susan's shoulders with his arm. She could hear the strong skim of his breathing, could almost feel the thick, potent reliability of his heart. When they reached his brother's car he leaned against the curve of the fender and drew her to his chest. He put out his own warm atmosphere, sweetened with Old Spice and Vitalis. Standing close to him put Susan in mind of a barnyard: new hay and the furred, well-fed haunches of animals.
    “Susan?” he whispered, and she felt his breath on her ear.
    “Mmm?”
    “Aw, Sooz, I, well. I think you're great.”
    She laughed, then sucked the laughter back in and tenderly kissed his ear. He was struggling with something.
    “I think you're great, too, sweetheart,” she whispered. A voice inside her seemed to say, This is romance. The asphalt road, pewter in the darkness, rolled away into trees and scattered porches. Todd's brother's Chevrolet gleamed with everything a car had to say about freedom and better luck. So why was some part of her unmoved? How was she able to retain her objective, cataloguing facility, the part that registered cars and porch lights and called them romance? She wanted to be swept away.
    “This is our last year,” Todd said. “After this, everything changes.”
    “I know. It'll be fun. I mean, college and everything.”
    He ran his finger along her spine. “Sure,” he said. “It'll be great. I just. . . Aw, never mind.”
    “What? What is it, honey?”
    “I've been here all my life. You know? I've never been anywhere else.”
    “I know,” she said. “I know that.”
    He breathed in, so deeply that she was crushed between his arms and the expansion of his chest. The ring pressed hard between her breasts.
    “This is goodbye to the golf course,” he said.
    “Just for now. We can come back out here in the spring. Todd, honey, everything's going to be all right. Everything's going to be wonderful.”
    “Right,” he said. “I know. Don't you think I know how wonderful everything's going to be?”
    The note of peevishness in his voice surprised her. Todd was never irritable or morose. He was a table set with oranges and a pitcher of milk.
    “It is, sweetie,” she said with brisk determination. “Think about college. Think about it, there's so much that's going to happen. It's going to be a whole new world.”
    He nodded. “I like this world,” he said. He looked past her to the golf course, where pines announced their ragged shapes against the sky.
    “I like it, too,” she said.
    He turned from her, looked with a fierce scientific intensity at the row of darkened houses on the far side of