Read Online The Last Girls by Lee Smith - Free Book Online Page B

evening. Here’s a photo of the grand finale when six or seven were fired off at once, exploding like an arrangement of celestial lilies in the sky over Magnolia Court. Looking up, the whole crowd went “ooh!” at once, three hundred faces bathed in the colored light. And who would ever guess that inside the potting shed which you can barely see in the bottom right-hand corner of this photograph, the mother of the bride and the florist were locked in a long, damp, passionate embrace?
    OF COURSE , GENE M INOR is not pictured in photograph after photograph of the children—Gene Minor is just for
her,
just for Courtney. He has no business here among these boys in various groups and various uniforms, shining heads all in a row, smiling or squinting into the sun, holding different kinds of balls. There’s Jeremy’s little face, Scotty’s big grin. Oh, if our children actually knew how much we love them, they’d never be able to hit any of these balls, they’d be simply immobilized by the force of it, by the awful force of our love. Probably in the long run it’s best that our children are shielded from us, as they are, by schools and churches and teams, by teachers and friends and other people.
    Then little girls in tutus, little girls on ponies; bigger girls in bodices, in dust caps, in plays; girls in bathing suits, with breasts. There’s Lydia grown hugely tall and toothy, carrying her hockey stick, making a goal. There’s Lydia hugging her teammates in an all-out way that makes Courtney vaguely uneasy. Lydia teaches now, history and hockey, at a prep school in Virginia. She runs marathons, and does not make hors d’oeuvres. Scotty is getting an M.B.A. at Duke. But Jeremy, well, something’s wrong with Jeremy, though Hawk willnot even admit it and no one seems to know what it is. “It’s just a phase . . .” Courtney has been saying this for years.
    But he was such a normal child. Look at him in these photographs, he looks just like every other boy on his Little League team, doesn’t he? Like every other boy in his Rainbow Soccer league, like every other boy in his graduating class. But like Gene Minor, Jeremy is not really pictured here either. Courtney doesn’t know where her sweet little Jeremy went or even when he disappeared. Why did his grades start going down, and why did he drop out of school freshman year at Williams College, despite his famous IQ? Courtney has no idea. Hawk is simply disgusted, calling Jeremy a “slacker.” And now he’s cut him off, which Jeremy seems not to mind or even notice. For several years now he’s been in Boulder, Colorado, living in a rented room over the secondhand bookstore where he works. Courtney tells everyone who asks that Jeremy is “finding himself,” though she doesn’t really believe it and would be even more worried about him if she didn’t have other, bigger fish to fry.
    S PEAKING OF FISH , here’s a picture to catch your eye: Hawk with that sailfish he caught off Cozumel two years ago on his annual trip with Scooter Bowles and Martin Hanes. Held upright by a block and tackle at the dock, this fish stands even taller than Hawk, who’s grinning ear to ear behind his sunglasses, beneath his fishing cap. Bare-chested, barefooted, he’s wearing those crazy, baggy old Hawaiian shorts he loves, looking just as much at home on this foreign dock as he does in a boardroom. A man accustomed to killing things—deer, birds, fish. Big fish. A man who can still stop a girl dead in her tracks just as he did—oh Lord, yes, didn’t he?—so many years ago.
    But Hawk’s most recent fishing trip, earlier this summer, in May, is not pictured here.
    Actually Courtney was in bed with Gene Minor when she found out about it. Wednesday afternoons are always theirs. Gene closes theflower shop and Courtney meets him at home—
his
house—with lunch, something