Read Online The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown - Free Book Online

up alongside him. ray rolls down the window and she continues to pretend they have just bumped into each other. They say things that she mulls over later, trying to read into them.
    “so the nightlife here is the same as ever,” he says. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
He shrugs, but she sees a line of bewilderment between
    his eyes.
sadie smiles ruefully. she imagines how it all looks to him, A. C. Peterson’s restaurant with its sprung booth cushions, its cracked Formica; the John brown’s lounge, still smelling of popcorn, the sons of the old regulars now hugging their beers at the bar. she imagines him walking into the bar, how they’d all wave at him and welcome him in and buy him rounds of drinks, their hands heavy on his back, his shoulders. sadie and her husband have gone there with couples at night after dinners out, and new music comes out of the same jukebox in the dark corner. The men at the bar talk about the girls they used to date, the ones that got away. They all married local women, work in family businesses, for the insurance companies, like sadie’s husband, or in local town agencies—law enforcement, fire department, DPw. some of them wear loosened ties, others have on work pants, boots, and flannel shirts. They are the seckingers, the battistons, the Mayocks. sadie knows that ray has never fit in. she must admit she has never fit in herself.
    For the next two weeks, when she emerges from play rehearsal, she finds ray’s truck parked in the school lot. neither of them mentions why he is there, the pauses in the conversation in which neither of them speaks seeming natural and yet weighted with what they do not say. They look at each other, or he fidgets with something in his truck. The parking lot lights leave them partially in shadow, his expression difficult to read. And then, “I hear they’re going to tear down the old bascomb house on Terry Plains.”
    “They’re going to have some sort of a ceremony before they do it.”
“will you be going to that?” he says.
sadie feels like she is still in character from The Night of the Iguana —her part that of Hannah, a woman who keeps her emotions carefully in check. when she says, “look at the time,” it’s as if he’s entered the play with her, saying his own line on cue: “we seem to have wasted it pretty well.”
sadie drives home, up three hills, along a wide open field, past houses set back from the road behind split-rail fences, to her own house in Gladwyn Hollow. she leaves the windows open so the cold air blows through. she did this as a teenager driving home, airing the smoke out of the car, out of her hair, so her father wouldn’t smell it. she isn’t sure what she is airing out now—the remnants of the words they spoke, the heightened tension, the scent of what she must confess is desire from her skin and clothing? she parks the car in the garage and steps into her house—warm and lamp-lit—and feels instantly caged. she drinks a glass of water at the sink. Craig will be upstairs in bed, reading something for work, the television on. The children will be asleep in their rooms, their faces lit by nightlights plugged into the wall sockets. In lily’s room the streetlight outside will leave a pale stripe across the crib’s patterned sheet. Craig will glance up at her and smile when she comes in, and she worries he will set aside his work, and slide down alongside her in the bed, and smell something on her skin, some evidence of everything she hasn’t been saying to ray Filley in the parking lot.
    she has just gotten used to the predictability, the imposed parameters of their meetings, when ray appears one morning at the end of her street. she is taking the children to school. It’s a Monday, and the children are unhappy about going. They have projects they began over the weekend—sylvia’s amusement park for her tiny dolls, and Max’s block city where his Matchbox cars careen and park. They want to wake up and