Call If You Need Me Read Online Free PDF

with her boyfriend. Pete and Betty, Leslie and her kids, Sarah and I, we all lived behind the restaurantwithin sight of one another, and I’d see Leslie’s kids going back and forth from their little place to Pete and Betty’s. Sometimes the kids would come over to our house and ring the doorbell and stand on the step and wait. Sarah would invite them in for cookies or pound cake and let them sit at the kitchen table like grownups and ask about their day and take an interest in their answers.
    Our own children had left home before we moved to this northern coastal region of California. Our daughter, Cindy, was living with several other young people in a house on several rocky acres of ground outside of Ukiah, in Mendocino County. They kept bees and raised goats and chickens and sold eggs and goat’s milk and jars of honey. The women worked on patchwork quilts and blankets too, and sold those when they could. But I don’t want to call it a commune. I’d have a harder time dealing with it, from what I’ve heard about communes, if I called it a commune, where every woman was every man’s property, things like that. Say she lived with friends on a little farm where everyone shared the labor. But, so far as we knew anyway, they were not involved in organized religion or any sort of sect. We had not heard from her for nearly three months, except for a jar of honey arriving in the mail one day, and a patch of heavy red cloth, part of a quilt she was working on. There was a note wrapped around the jar of honey, which said:
    Dear Mom and Dad
    I sewed this myself and I put this Honey up myself. I am learning to do things here.
    Love,
    Cindy
    But two of Sarah’s letters went unanswered and then that fall the Jonestown thing happened and we were wild for a day or two that she could be there, for all we knew, in British Guiana. We only had a post-office box number in Ukiah for her. I called the sheriff’s office down there and explained the situation, and he drove out to the place to take a head count and carry a messagefrom us. She called that night and first Sarah talked to her and wept, and then I talked to her and wept with relief. Cindy wept too. Some of her friends were down there in Jonestown. She said it was raining, and she was depressed, but the depression would pass, she said; she was where she wanted to be, and doing what she wanted to do. She’d write us a long letter and send us a picture soon.
    So when Leslie’s children came to visit, Sarah always took a large and real interest in them and sat them down at the table and made them cocoa and served them cookies or pound cake and took a genuine interest in their stories.
    But we were moving, we had decided to separate. I was going to Vermont to teach for a semester in a small college and Sarah was going to take an apartment in Eureka, a nearby town. At the end of four and a half months, at the end of the college semester, then we’d take a look at things and see. There was no one else involved for either of us, thank God, and we had neither of us had anything to drink now for nearly a year, almost the amount of time we had been living in Pete’s house together, and somehow there was just enough money to get me back east and to get Sarah set up in her apartment. She was already doing research and secretarial work for the history department at the college in Eureka, and if she kept the same job even, and the car, and had only herself to support, she could get by all right. We’d live apart for the semester, me on the East Coast, she on the West, and then we’d take stock, see what was what.
    While we were cleaning the house, me washing the windows and Sarah down on her hands and knees cleaning woodwork, the baseboards and corners with a pan of soapy water and an old T-shirt, Betty knocked on the door. It was a point of honor for us to clean this house and clean it well before we left. We had even taken a wire brush and scoured the bricks around the fireplace.