Age of Consent Read Online Free PDF

doesn’t seem real. She half expects to turn a corner and find a wax statue of General Washington in a period room roped off by velvet.
    But here is something real: a phone book. It takes less than a minute to find Dan’s name and the small print that lists his address. She could phone his home number easily enough. There it is, printed on the phone book’s fragile paper. She could call him, hear his voice again. But she doesn’t. Won’t.
    —
    SHE HAS THREE different ways to fall asleep. The first, a set of single-shot bottles that tinkle like glass beads when she takes them from her suitcase and sets them out on the dresser. She’s been carrying these bottles around for years because once a man seated beside her on a transatlantic flight described a cold remedy in which this particular whiskey was useful. The second method is five-milligram tablets of melatonin that she thinks will be too weak to do much but which she knows cannot hurt her. And, finally, a real sleeping pill she doesn’t dare use for fear she’ll be groggy in the morning or sleep through her alarm altogether.
    She takes a couple of melatonin and then soaks in the tub, reading a book. She needs to remain relaxed in the little room; she needs not to think about tomorrow. The melatonin helps. When finally she peels back the layered bedclothes, slipping between the snug, ironed sheets, she hears the bed groan and imagines the whole room growing drowsy with her. She dims the light to the minimum she can read by. Moonlight edges the blinds; crickets chirp outside on the grass. She is waiting for the night to close altogether, the pages of the book she brought becoming blurry, when a knock on the door wakens her all over again.
    It’s Mrs. Campbell, the innkeeper. The apron is gone and now she wears a cardigan with a cameo broach by the collar. She can’t be more than ten years older than Bobbie but there is something antique about her; she is a woman who attends to details—pressed flowers, starched curtains, plumped-up cushions. But Mrs. Campbell isn’t here over some small matter, Bobbie can tell. There is an urgency to her voice when she whispers, “Someone is here to see you.”
    Bobbie is about to tell her that isn’t possible, that nobody knows where she is staying except the DA’s office, when from over the woman’s shoulder she sees a flash of bright red hair, the glint of a gold earring, and a line of lipstick, the color of which belongs in her mind to only one person.
    Bobbie’s body senses her mother’s presence even before she is aware that it is June who comes charging through the door. She feels herself being unfastened from adulthood and hurtled backward through time. All the decades during which they have not seen each other enter the room with her mother, with June, and it is suddenly as though Bobbie never left home at all, never grew up, or ran her own business, or bought her own house. She is again the girl who was lost, the teenage runaway, the disappeared. This happens in an instant.
    June must have prepared something to say. In the car on the drive over, or earlier while checking her reflection in the mirror, even days ago, she might have spelled out in her mind a greeting for the daughter she has not seen for so long. But if this is the case, the words have vanished. June stares up at Bobbie as though it is Bobbie who has suddenly appeared in the room. Meanwhile Bobbie feels herself both here, standing on the rag rug beside the four-poster bed, and at the same time far away, watching.
    Her mother is not the mother she remembers, not the image she has carried in her mind for three decades. June is no longer plump, no longer carefully “put together,” either. Gone are her crisply ironed clothes, her polished nails and carefully blended, discreet makeup. She wears chunky wrist cuffs, an array of colorful rings, a flowing top that is bright and sweeping, showing a little too much flesh for a woman in her sixties, and a