A Hidden Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

Travis too impossibly large and lushly furnished. He watched in a sort of dazed incomprehension, and when Nancy pressed her body toward him he intertwined his arm with hers and they were, at least, that close.
    After the movie they went for Cokes.
    The Wilcox girl’s hair had strayed down in front of her eyes again. She probed at the ice with her straw and said, “You don’t go out much, do you?”
    “Is it so obvious?”
    “No, Travis. Nothing wrong. Just you seemed a bit uncomfortable is all.”
    Travis was carefully silent.
    She said, “I guess you were kind of a misfit back where you came from.”
    “Your mother told you that?”
    “Said as much, I guess, but that’s not what I mean. I mean the way you move, the way you talk. Very, I don’t know, wary. Like something’s going to jump out at you.”
    “A misfit,” he said. “I guess that’s about it.”
    “I’m a misfit. Did you know that?” She sipped her Coke again.
    “Those books?”
    “Partly. Nobody reads in this town. Miss Thayer who works at the library, she doesn’t even read. But that’s not all of it.” She said, as if offering a vital confidence, “I don’t get along with people.”
    “I know what that’s like,” Travis said.
    “Partly it’s my mother. She makes a profession out of being righteous. She believes the world is going straight to hell. So I guess the pressure’s on me to live up to all that. I’m supposed to be perfect—a saintly little female Imitation of Christ. I guess I just, ah, cracked.” She laughed. “She’s so afraid of everything, you know, Travis? Afraid and suspicious. And I’m the opposite.”
    He smiled distantly. “Never afraid?”
    “Not of what she’s afraid of.”
    “What’s she afraid of?”
    Nancy gazed out the big window of the diner. It was way past dark now. All the cars had their lights on. “Love. Sex. Politics. Dirty words.” She waved her hand. “All that.”
    “Oh,” Travis said, taken aback.
    “Are you afraid of those things?” She was staring at him now.
    “Hell, no,” he said, hoping it was not a lie.
    But she laughed and seemed to loosen up. “No,” she said, “no, I don’t guess you are.” And she drained her Coke. “Walk me home?”
    At the corner of the street where she lived Nancy turned and touched his arm. “I don’t want my mother to see us. She’ll be on to us soon enough anyway. You can kiss me if you want, Travis.”
    The offer surprised him. He was clumsy but earnest.
    She nodded thoughtfully then, as if she had entered some particularly revealing notation in a private notebook. His hands lingered on her.
    “One day,” she said, “you have to tell me the truth about it.”
    “About what?”
    “You know. Where you came from. What happened there.” She hesitated. “Your mother.”
    “She was a very fine woman,” Travis said.
    “Is that the truth?”
    He stepped away from her. “Yes.”

Chapter Three
    T hree Sundays after Travis arrived in Haute Montagne, Liza Burack made up her special mille-feuilles for the Baptist Women’s bake sale.
    The day was dusty and hot, as all the days had been that parched summer, and the baked goods were set up on the lawn of the First Baptist, in the shadow of the high quatrefoil stained-glass windows which were the building’s only adornment. Reverend Shaffer had brought out the big sprucewood tables and Mrs. Clawson had provided drop cloths. The edibles were displayed thereon—quite artistically, Liza thought, the candies and pastries in attractive circles like tiny works of art. Shirley Croft’s almond cake had been given, as usual, pride of place. Shirley herself stood guard against the circling flies, flailing with an elder branch and wearing the sort of vigilant expression her late husband might have displayed to the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. Faye Wilcox was at one end of the table, Liza at the other, like the two polarities of an electrical cell.
    I will just drift down, Liza thought. After