Read Online Picture This by Jacqueline Sheehan - Free Book Online

going one step further in the direction of meeting the girl. Rocky needed Hill’s physicality; she wanted to hear his steady voice, the way he could equate all of life to archery. Most of all, she wanted his arms wrapped around her before she doled out the information. Hill lived in Brunswick, north of Portland, and Rocky drove as if she were swimming underwater, losing oxygen.
    Hill gave off a cinnamon scent, with a background of pencil shavings mixed with something like wind and his own good sweat, which, when fresh, was nearly intoxicating. She imagined the scent of him as she drove. Rocky understood the unique function of the olfactory part of the brain, so tied to memories and emotions. This was the good dog part of the brain where scent carried all the information and all the emotions that she needed right now. She pictured a dog’s brain evenly split between scent and sound, both leading directly through the heart.
    How had Hill’s scent wormed its way into her brain so essentially? As a couple, they were new, several months in the making. She had sniffed the majestic symmetry of Hill, and she was ready to let go, to rest in his arms. They had not yet made love together; Hill was keenly aware of the loss that she’d suffered when Bob died.
    â€œWe can go as slow as we need to,” he had said. “Your husband made the terrible error of dying, and I know that you’re still sad and you’ll miss him for as long as you live. I am 90 percent through a divorce, so you and I aren’t exactly at the starting gate. But I don’t want anyone except you.”
    She reached his street in Brunswick, led by the scent of him on her lips, her skin, consciously skipping the part where she would have called him to say, “Hey, I’m thirty minutes away from your house. I’m coming over.” No, this was the next stage in their relationship, the natural stage with unimpeded connections between them, where her arrival at his front door would be unquestioned and he would sweep her in like the welcome tide that she was. This was what her life would be like without Bob.
    Hill had passed all the tests with Tess and Isaiah. “You must have the good dude radar,” Tess had said. “You’ve found two good men, and for some women that doesn’t ever happen. The same jerks keep reappearing.” Rocky had thought that was an unusually harsh comment from her primarily Buddhist friend and said so.
    â€œI’m not being harsh, just descriptive,” Tess said.
    Rocky was less than a block from Hill’s house when she saw another car in his driveway. Something about the car, the unfamiliar angle of it and the silver glow of it nudged close to Hill’s truck, said ownership. I belong here .
    Rocky put her foot on the brake and stopped, turned off her headlights, and gripped the steering wheel as a sour note mixed with her saliva. Hill was oblivious about closing the drapes in his living room, and the kitchen curtains were perpetually open on the top half of the windows. The woman came to Hill’s shoulder, petite and fair-haired, with a hand on his cheek, a tilt to her head. Rocky turned the engine off. Hill’s arm rose, lifting the hand from his cheek. Exit stage left by Hill, followed by the woman, whom Rocky knew without a moment’s hesitation. This was Julie, the wife who had been gone for two years.
    She could hear her brother’s warning. “He’s separated from his wife. That doesn’t mean divorced, and it shouldn’t mean available. If they had grown up Catholic like us, they would know that adultery is grounds for purgatory, except purgatory has been banished from our lexicon of afterlife locations. Wait a minute—the pope did away with limbo, not purgatory.” Rocky was surprised that Caleb remembered anything from their spotty Catholic education. She had been confident that Caleb’s hesitation about Hill would disappear as soon