Read Online On the Right Side of a Dream by Sheila Williams - Free Book Online Page B

that some poor soul thought these little hills could give up. They ain’t fooling me. They trudged up here for the same reason that I did—the view.
    I found me a spot just perfect for my behind where I could lean against a boulder and rest my back. I looked down on the town sprawled along the highway. And off in the distance, I saw the red rocks gleaming in the late morning sunshine. It’s a beautiful and peaceful spot and sometimes I would nestle against the rock and close my eyes. (After checking for snakes first.) Besides the back porch of the diner that overlooks Arcadia Lake, I think this is one of my favorite places.
    Used to be, a long time ago—in another life, as Nina would say—I was afraid of places like this. Open places, spaces where hills bury their toes into the earth, where the fingertips of the mountains tickle the sky. I’d stand on the back porch of Jess’s diner and look out at Arcadia Lake and wonder what Kaylin’s Ridge was like but was too scared to go there. I’d been used to tiny places with tight boundaries. I knew fences and barriers and right angles. The openness of the plains, the never-ending green of the forest with its splotches of gold sunshine beneath my feet, I didn’t know these things until I came west. The land, the people, people like Millie, all of these things. Before I knew Millie I thought I needed rooms to be safe. Thought I needed small places and small ideas to go with them.
    It’s all turned upside down on me now. I don’t like cities, I don’t like traffic, I don’t give a damn about nice shopping. Give me a vast grassy plain, a mountain or two, a little desert for spice, and a cool forest of towering pines. From afraid of spaces to afraid of fences, that’s me. And now, I needed the canyon’s depth to think, the nosebleed section of the red rock’s highest point to mourn.
    And so, I’m here with my butt settled into place, wiping my eyes and balling up tissues and wondering why I’m crying over a woman who I’ve only known a short time—an old broad who never met a challenge she didn’t accept or see a roadblock that she didn’t go around. And even the prospect of death—like everything else—didn’t scare Millie. She was just afraid that it would inconvenience her.
    “Doesn’t frighten me one damn bit, except . . .” she’d told me the last time I saw her. This was when she was on the mend from the broken hip and hobbling around on a cane. “Except that I have so much planned! The cruise next year and the Doc and I were thinking about Alaska. Did you know that I spent some time in Alaska? Ketchikan.” Her sapphire-blue eyes sparkled with mischief.
    “Millie, nothing you say ever surprises me,” I’d told her. But I could not imagine her wearing those sheer negligees in Ketchikan. When I told her that, she smiled impishly.
    “I wore less than that! It’s
amazing
how warm a log fire can be. I have so much to do. If only we could have death by appointment. Then, maybe, I could work everything in.”
    A scratching sound caught my attention, pulling me away from the memory and my tears. A pair of rabbits scampered up the hill, stopped, looked at me as if I owed them last month’s rent, then hopped away.
    At eighty plus, which is all she’d ever admit to, Millie had so much to do, so many plans. Going on forty-five, I was afraid to make any. Scared that something would go wrong. Scared that I would fail.
    I heard the screech of a hawk above me farther up the ridge. From the sound of things, it had lunch on its mind and was preparing to make the pickup. That’s focus for you.
    “I can’t do that,” I would tell Millie when she would suggest that I try this or go there.
    Her deep blue eyes would darken for a moment then narrow and her face would take on a serious expression.
    “Of course you can,” she would snap back. “Don’t tell yourself that you can’t and don’t pay attention to anybody
else
who has small ideas about what you can