Read Online Pulling Home by Mary Campisi - Free Book Online

all she had left was Christian.

Chapter 8
    “I promised myself if I ever got out, I’d set things straight with Corrine’s daughter.”—Doris O’Brien
    The birds woke Audra the next morning, chirping from the gnarled oak outside
    the window. She threw back the covers and stretched. If she hurried she could sneak in a run before anyone woke up. She wasn’t avoiding them but Joe Wheyton could stare down a blind man and Alice was too overwrought to concern herself with her husband’s behavior. The man would just as soon kick Audra out if he thought he could keep Kara and get away with it. Christian always said his father was all bluster, that deep down he was a real softy. Doubtful.
    Audra slipped on sweats and a T-shirt and made her way down the steps and out
    the back door. Holly Springs hadn’t changed much in nine years, especially the middle class area where the Wheytons lived. Her old house of course was on the other side of town. The wrong side. She stretched and began jogging along the familiar streets, past alleys and paths leading to schools and churches, the post office, Kroger’s, True Value.
    This part of the country had a natural greenness about it that didn’t exist on the West Coast unless someone spread it from an aerator or pellet. In Holly Springs, grass sprouted in lush, rolling clumps along hillsides and banks, surrounding sidewalks and pathways.
    The foliage too had a healthy sheen to it—green, glossy, and natural. San Diego as seen from the road offered cactus and brown brush, spiky protrusions hugging the ground, so unlike this area. There was true beauty here, in the land, in the surroundings, but unfortunately, not in the people.
    There were those who said West Coasters were hollow and fake, gathering their
    mantras from the newest gurus to hit the New York Times Bestseller list, honing fashion sense from the pages of GQ and Mademoiselle , choosing mates based on BMI’s instead of compatibility. It was true to some degree. But for all the illusion and emptiness, there were still those who held true values, who believed in right and common sense, who would not compromise integrity. Christian had been such a person. Peter was one, too.
    Fifteen minutes later, Audra ended up on her old street. Hadn’t she somehow
    known she would have to see the house of her childhood, if for nothing else than to compare memory with reality? A red and white For Sale sign protruded from an
    overgrown lawn. The house she remembered as powder-blue shingled was now
    gunsmoke, peeling around rusty gutters and beneath windows covered with plastic. It was a tiny box of a house with a narrow entrance and even narrower windows. Grandma
    Lenore had taught Audra to clean those windows twice a year with ammonia and
    newspapers because newspapers didn’t make lint like paper towels did, and of course, there was the cost to consider.
    There was always the cost to consider in those days. Everything costs money , she’d said. What she hadn’t said was why they never had any. She didn’t need to though because Audra knew the difference between what hung in her mother’s closet and Mrs.
    Mertigan’s hand-me-downs. And then there were the perfumes, and the shoes, and the liquor. Audra figured it out all on her own. And people thought she was like her mother?
    They had no idea. She inched toward a side window and tried to peer through the thick plastic.
    “Audra Valentine?”
    Audra swung around. The woman who had cornered her outside the funeral home
    and declared she’d been Corrine’s best friend stood three feet away in a lime housedress belted at the waist with a cord that looked an awful lot like a clothesline rope. Doris O’Brien. She wore pink slippers, pink pearls, and pink lipstick. “Where did you come from?” Why hadn’t she heard the woman’s rattled breathing which now clogged the distance between them?
    Doris threw her a wide smile, revealing uneven, dingy teeth and announced, “I’ve been waiting