Read Online The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks - Free Book Online

you might say, made her appear wonderfully attractive to me. After the accident, however, it made her seem stupid and weak, and it embarrassed me to find myself talking so intimately with her.
    She had always been essentially the same person, of course, just as I had been, but the Bide a Wile Motel, which she and Wendell bought from the bank at auction and which anyone who’d ever tracked the economy of this town could have predicted would be nothing but a sinkhole for their little bit of money (that’s the sort of thing you can predict), was probably the start of her decline, the ending of her dream, the end of her youth. Some people, when their dreams collapse, turn superstitious in order to explain it, and Risa is one of them. The motel, in addition to the insurmountable financial difficulties it created for them, made Wendell, who’d always worked behind the counter of someone else’s business, never his own, look lazy and a little dumb and pessimistic to her, which of course he was anyhow and had been from the day they married. But she hadn’t seen it before, and now she believed that his character was getting in front of her realizing a very important dream. That got her angry at him in a profound way, which drove him further into himself, and although they both loved their boy Sean dearly, they soon began to love each other less. That’s when he started going to bed early and alone, and Risa started meeting me in Room 11.
    By that time, which was about three years before the accident, their marriage was essentially dead, except for their love of Sean, of course. I suppose I want to believe that; anyone who’s an interloper in a marriage wants to think the marriage was dead before he pulled up and parked; but in this case I’m sure it’s the truth.
    It started innocently enough hat is, without my knowing anything had been started. I’ve known Risa and Wendell most of my life; we more or less grew up together here in Sam Dent, although Risa is a few years younger than Wendell and I. When I was in Vietnam, Wendell, who was bagging groceries at Valley Grocery in Keene Valley, started dating Risa, who was then barely out of the eighth grade. They stuck together, though, and the year she graduated high school, he got a job as a Tru Value cashier in Marlowe, and they got married. I always liked Wendell, even though he was indeed, as Risa eventually discovered, lazy and pretty dumb and pessimistic. That’s a hard combination for a wife to like, and frankly I never would have hired him to work for me, even if he had been one of the Vietnam vets who for a long time were the only people I hired at the garage. But Wendell made it relatively simple, by being good looking and passive, for a man to call him a friend. (Some folks might regard him as low key or easygoing, but I have to say passive. ) What it came down to was that in an important sense, Wendell didn’t really give a damn about much.
    He liked sportsTV sports, that is; he was a little heavy in the gut to play any himself and he was very fond of his son. Not like Risa was, of course, for she was much more intense about everything than he, but sufficiently fond to have his heart broken by the boy’s death.
    Wendell is like the rest of us, a person whose life has two meanings, one before the accident and one after. I doubt, however, that he worries much about connecting the two meanings, as the rest of us do, but that’s Wendell Walker. That was always Wendell Walker. Even so, I felt guilty because, before his life became a tragedy, he was basically a likable fellow. Just as, before her life became a tragedy, Risa’s superstitious nature was an aspect of her character that was downright attractive. At least to me it was.
    I was a widower and a relatively young man still, with two small children in a big house and a business that was making money but was top heavy with debt. Those were the facts that filled my head night and day the death of my wife, the needs