Carry Me Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

of her visit, and she had made Zoe laugh more than once in the nervous weeks leading up to the interview trip. Since then, she’d helped her find her apartment, given her a tour of the town, and made her laugh some more, and an unlikely friendship had been born.
    They’d gone out for lunch in the student union in those early days before school had started, when Zoe had known barely a soul other than her all-male colleagues, who seemed to regard her either as unwelcome competition, the product of preferential hiring, or a potential conquest. And Zoe had learned that Rochelle needed a friend herself.
    “Yep. Separated three big months,” Rochelle had said, eyeing the lasagna with a sigh and passing it by in favor of a salad. “Divorce sucks. On the other hand, not having to cook is a plus, especially the crap Lake liked. He thought it was scarily gourmet if I put red peppers in the Ragu spaghetti sauce, spent all dinnertime picking them out. Mr. Culture. Besides, the problem with marrying a good ol’ boy is that he stays just that.”
    “What? Good? How’s that bad?”
    “No. A boy. A bunch of buddies and a keg of beer and a baggie full of weed is a good time in high school. That’s where I met him, thought he was wild and crazy. Women just love a bad boy. And ‘Lake’? I thought that was some sexy name. I found out later that his mom had read a romance novel where the hero’s name was Lachlan while she was pregnant. Turns out that was about as close as he ever did get to romance. Eventually he hit thirty, and that same old good time? That was still pretty much it. Well, that and the waitress on the breakfast shift down at the Kozy Korner.”
    “So the divorce was . . . his idea?” Zoe asked delicately.
    “Oh, no, honey,” Rochelle said. “That was me all the way, the day I came home with the flu and found out what happened after her shift was over. I moved to town, left him in that farmhand’s house with the wind blowing through the cracks, that splintery wood floor, hardly any heat and always about twenty below in the winter. I got my own apartment, first place of my own I ever lived in. Not that it isn’t crappy,” she admitted. “One tiny window in the bedroom at the back, looking out on a ‘courtyard’ that’s really just a paved yard and a couple lousy trees, one more window in the living room that I have to keep the curtains pulled on if I don’t want to give a show to everybody walking down Main Street. Way too small, way too dark, and furnished right out of the Goodwill store and every garage sale in town, that’s my place. But hey, it’s mine. My paycheck goes for me now, not for beer and cigarettes and more of that weed. You’d be surprised how good that feels.”
    “No,” Zoe said, “I don’t think I would. It’s important to know that you don’t have to depend on somebody else, that you can make it on your own. To be independent.”
    “Yeah,” Rochelle said, stabbing unenthusiastically at her salad and heaving a sigh. “That’s what I tell myself. It’s just too bad that I still like ’em big and tough. My sister keeps telling me to find some nice engineering professor. She married the guy who runs Owl Drug, you know the one?”
    “I think so,” Zoe said. “The pharmacist? That him?”
    “Comb-over and all,” Rochelle said. “I swear, he about had that comb-over in high school. And have you had the lucky chance to cast your eyes over the engineering professors yet?”
    “Not so much. Other than a new faculty orientation.”
    “And did you see anybody there worth my while?”
    “Uh . . . not that I noticed. But maybe some of the other departments would be better. I was mostly talking to the ones in engineering and physical sciences. Math, too.”
    “Oh. Math,” Rochelle said glumly. “Yippee-ki-yay.”
    Zoe laughed. “Yeah. I’d give it a pretty definitive no.”
    “Same difference in engineering. Besides, who wants to be a perk of the job? Not me. Don’t