Be Mine Read Online Free PDF

if
I'd
killed
my
children, or known someone who had, as if there were blood on my hands—the kind of grief and guilt I used to wake up with, then carry around with me all day, the year after Robbie died. I'd open my eyes after some dream, look at the ceiling and inhale, feeling it somewhere around my solar plexus, the feeling that I had killed my brother, strangled him, suffocated him, injected his veins with air.
    Who needs entertainment like that?
    So, I'll go to Silver Springs tomorrow morning, stay at the Holiday Inn overnight, just long enough to feed Dad his dinner and lay a cool hand on his, and all I'll miss here is a disturbing DVD, a workout at the gym.
    No notes in my mailbox today, but word has gotten around (Beth, our secretary), and everyone's been teasing me about my secret admirer. What if it turns out to be Mr. Connery, they've said, our librarian of the strange small hats? Or the wild-haired grill guy in the cafeteria? Or the new Chippendale security guard—he of the five o'clock shadow and (we're guessing here, no one's seen him with his shirt off) the abs of steel?
    Maybe it's a joke, I said.
    Maybe someone feels sorry for me. Lonely old English teacher...
    Robert Z piped up fast.
    "Hey, don't sell yourself short, Sherry. There are a lot of us around here who'd be writing you love notes if we thought it would do any good."
    (It can't be him, can it? He wouldn't say such a thing in front of everyone if it were.)
    Beth said, "What's Jon got to say about this?" and I realized I hadn't told him, yet, about the last note.
    "Amused," I said. "Jon's just amused."
    "Yeah," Robert Z said with what I thought sounded ever-so-slightly like contempt. "Jon strikes me as a very secure guy."
     
    T HE DRIVE to Silver Springs was pure winter again. Gray. Low sky. The hawks must be hungry, with everything frozen solid or hibernating. I saw two of them swoop down at one time on something in the median. I was driving too fast to see what it was they were after, or if a fight over it ensued, but the swooping from opposite ends of the road seemed choreographed—smooth and fast and feathered.
    I tried to listen to the radio, but never found a station I could tolerate. Even a few years ago I knew the names of the bands on the rock stations. Chad would tell me about them, his opinions on them, which were usually negative, since he was always one for the rustic poets—Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty. Still, he kept me up to date.
    Today, it depressed me. The angry din, or the synthetic vapid pop-star stuff. Like a fussy old lady I wanted to complain to someone that it
just isn't music.
    And, at the same time, it seems, truly, like only a year or two ago that I was eighteen in the front row of a Ted Nugent concert, stuffing Kleenex into my ears when the band started up with the sound of a plane landing on my head.
    I did not stuff that Kleenex into my ears because I didn't like the music, only because I'd promised my mother that I would—so that I wouldn't weaken my hearing as she insisted my brother had at a Who concert.
    Ted was beautiful.
    His hair was long and wild and uncombed. He wore leather pants, a belt with a huge silver star for a buckle. Shirtless, glistening with sweat, and insane-seeming, to me he was the perfect man. And the music—serious, industrial, midwestern music. He spit into the audience, and a cool spray of it feathered lightly over my chest. My boyfriend recoiled as I rubbed it into my skin with the palm of my hand, but at the moment, having Ted Nugent's spit on my chest seemed like the most sexual and glorious experience of my life.
    But there do not, any longer, seem to be any radio stations that play Ted Nugent. Or Bob Seger. Or the Who.
    Or, if they do, those bands have changed so much I don't recognize the music.
    After a while, I turned it off and listened to the hum of my tires and the sound of wind blowing around me.
    It was, I thought, like the music you'd hear if you were that mouse or vole or