Read Online Wildwood by Drusilla Campbell - Free Book Online

“Lucky Hilltop School.”
    “He noticed my diploma.”
    “So? It’s on the wall.” The music was Wagner. “Turn it down, Jeanne. I can’t take Valhalla this morning.”
    She looked at the telephone answering machine on the table next to the radio. She enjoyed talking on the phone, enjoyed being free to speak without being observed. But she resented the demands of the answering machine and would sometimes let twenty calls accumulate before pressing the play button. In her otherwise responsible personality, this was an aberration about which she could seem to do nothing. Did it signal something fundamentally unsound in her? A flaw she had been unable to eradicate?
    Only one call today.
    “Your sainted friend.” Teddy had never liked Hannah.
    “What did she want?”
    “I didn’t talk to her, Jeanne.”
    “Did she leave a message?”
    “I don’t know why we have an answering machine if you won’t use it.”
    Jeanne touched the play button. The machine whirred and clicked and Hannah’s deep voice came over the line.
    “Come over after school, okay?”
    Jeanne pressed rewind.
    Teddy thumbed the hollows on either side of the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I’m going to make it to that building committee meeting, Jeanne. You’re going to have to do it.”
    “Teddy, I haven’t seen Liz—”
    “Go tonight.”
    “It’s board Thursday.”
    “The building committee won’t go past five.”
    “I promised Edith White I’d listen to the problems the housekeeping staff’s having. Those old bathrooms in Senior House are going to have to be replaced. The maids are sick of the mess. The least we can do is listen to their complaints. You want to do that for me?”
    “You’re the one who speaks Spanish.” Teddy sat forward and Jeanne slipped a second pillow behind his head. “Besides, if they don’t like the work, they can quit. It’s not like there’s a shortage of wetbacks.”
    Jeanne looked at her husband a long moment.
    “Sorry, old girl,” he said. “It’s this headache.”
    She returned to the dressing room; and, despite the drought, ran the cold water a few seconds and splashed her face until it tingled. She patted it dry and applied a light sheen of lipstick to her wide mouth. She noted that the lines on either side, the parentheses, were deepening and so were those between her green eyes—eyes like peeled grapes, her brother used to tease. She must frown more than she realized. A little foundation might conceal them but lipstick was the only makeup she wore. When she was a teenager, she’d come home with five dollars’ worth of Tangee cosmetics, and her mother’s inebriated scolding still rang in her mind. A woman demeans her sex when she paints her face.
    In the bedroom again she asked Teddy, “So what are your plans?”
    “If I can get up later, I will. That’s about the best I can promise.”
    Jeanne stood at the door. “I’ll bring you back some tapes from the library.”
    “You’re a saint, Jeanne. What would I do without you?”
     
     
    In the weeks following Billy Phillips’s funeral Liz had thought of Bluegang hundreds of times; in a way he was always in her mind in the same way she was always breathing whether she thought about it or not. She had told herself that what happened at Bluegang was an accident, a terrible misstep; and it wasn’t her fault, it was Hannah who pushed him and Jeanne who insisted they say nothing. But that was where her memory came unhinged and sometimes Liz felt like she had pushed Billy Phillips down onto the rocks herself.
    Time’s passage rounded off the sharp angles of memory but it didn’t sink to the bottom of her consciousness, it never eroded. It was there like a stone in the shoe, a toothache, cramps, but she learned to ignore it. In time she became good at this—especially after she turned thirteen and got into trouble for smoking down by the old henhouse and kissing Eric Margolis behind the youth center. Her life crowded with new