Read Online Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page A

you, we have a little ceremony at the conclusion of the classes. The students' families and friends come, and we have a stipend for bringing in some professionals—an agent and an editor, usually. We've been lucky with that so far—we've gotten some really good people.”
    “Great,” Helen says. “So I'll come to the library for the first class, and where do I go?”
    “It will be one of the study rooms upstairs,” Nancy says. “We haven't quite decided which one yet, but we'll let you know at least a week beforehand. I'll send the information with the contract.”
    “Looking forward to it,” Helen says. It sticks in her throat a bit, yet she finds she really means it. At last, a way to get out of the house that carries with it some familiarity and legitimacy. And income. She recalls a time when she was ten years old and made pot holders on a loom, then went door-to-door selling them—ten cents for the small ones, twenty-five cents for the large. An unshaven man wearing a soiled bathrobe bought out her entire remaining inventory, and for years she clung to the belief that he was very wealthy. Never mind the ramshackle appearance of his one-story home—peeling paint, a dying lawn—Helen just knew that he had sacks of money in the basement with dollar signs stenciled on them, Scrooge McDuck style.
    “I'll be really glad to finally meet you,” Nancy says, and her voice is warm and sincere.
    “Me, too,” Helen says.
    She hangs up the phone, leans against the kitchen counter, and thinks about what besides milk and suet she needs at the grocery store. She feels a pleasurable stirring of something she cannot quite identify, but then does: it's the idea that she will now write something. Even if it's only exercises for a writing class, she can step out of here into there .

seven
    “W ELL . H APPY D ECEMBER SEVENTEENTH !” H ELEN SAYS . S HE IS standing at a podium before an audience of two hundred, organized by the friends of this particular library. Most times when Helen does these things, she prepares a few words of general introduction, then reads from her work. This time, the woman in charge asked her to speak only. “After all, we can all read by ourselves,” she said. “We look upon this as an opportunity for our patrons to get to know you.”
    Helen understands the impulse; she has felt it herself. Once, she and Dan took a driving trip in Maine and they found the house where one of Helen's favorite authors, E. B. White, used to live. They sat parked outside it for some time, Helen imagining the life that used to go on there. She wondered what the kitchen looked like, the bedroom, the library, surely there was a massive-size library. “I wish we could walk around the grounds,” she said.
    Dan shrugged. “Let's ask.”
    “We can't do that!” Helen said, and Dan said why not, all the new owners could say was no, nothing would happen .
    Helen sat still, thinking.
    “Want me to go ask?” Dan said.
    “Yes. No!”
    “I'll just see if anyone's home.” He went up the walk and knocked on the front door. When it opened, Dan spoke to someone and pointed at the car. Helen waved—at whom, she had no idea; she couldn't see who stood inside.
    Dan came back to the car, beaming. The woman who lived there was most accommodating when she heard Helen was a writer (though she'd never heard of Helen, he reluctantly admitted) and she told Dan that he and Helen could go ahead and look around all they liked. She even told Dan how to get down to E. B. White's writing shed by the water, trusting them to be there alone. When Helen walked into that little shed with its slab of wooden desk and bare floors and open window that framed the blue waters of the bay, she burst into tears. She cried for the beautiful words White had written, and she cried because he was dead, and she cried for the privilege of being in this space, where he had looked out this very window and smoked and thought and written lines full of such humor,