Color the Sidewalk for Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

How could I stay in Bradleyville without work to occupy my thoughts?
    I also had to say good-bye to every patient at Hillsdale, plus figure out what to do with my home and cats. Fortunately, Monica came to my rescue. The day I left she moved into my house, nodding patiently at my harried plant-watering instructions and petting Mamie and Daisy under their upraised chins.
    â€œYou’re wonderful,” I panted as we lugged in her things. “Don’t worry, I won’t be gone too long.”
    â€œAre you kidding?” she said, grinning. “A cute place and no roommate! Take your time!”
    The insouciance of the young.
    I forced down half a sandwich for lunch and left. I drove all afternoon, fighting my memories and losing the battle. The farther I got from Little Rock, the more my dread increased. It was as if I rode a time machine, the familiar present unraveling into an inhospitable past. When I could pull my thoughts back to Little Rock, it was only to remember what the consequences of Bradleyville had cost me there.
    In seventeen years I’d had only two relationships with men. Roger, an attorney, had asked me out numerous times before I said yes. After three months of dating, he finally broke through my barriers enough to convince me to tell him all about my troubled past. And like all armchair counselors, once I capitulated, he knew exactly what steps I needed to take in order to heal.
    For all his good intentions, he got nowhere.
    â€œYou have to get past that guilt of yours,” he told me with exasperation four months later over dinner at an expensive restaurant. “You need to see a therapist.”
    I bristled beneath my red silk dress. “No, I don’t. I’m handling it just fine on my own.”
    â€œYou call sobbing before a lighted candle all night handling it just fine?”
    â€œThat’s none of your business,” I retorted. “It’s only once a year. I told you to go home.”
    â€œI wanted to help you.”
    â€œI didn’t want your help. You can’t help!”
    He reached for my hand. “But I want to. Please let me. You keep it all bottled up, but it’s got to go somewhere. And where it’s gone is right here, sitting between us, getting in the way of what we could have.”
    Three years later Michael could do no better with me. I’d learned from the heartbreak with Roger and so had told Michael nothing. “You’re so remote,” he said one evening at dinner after we’d been seeing each other for ten months. Frustrated hurt poured from him. “You just won’t trust me with who you really are.”
    On I drove. Around dinnertime I crossed the state line. “Welcome to Kentucky, the Bluegrass State,” read the large sign.
    Soon afterward I left the interstate, heading east through familiar winding hills. After an hour darkness began to fall. The evening air breezed through my window and swirled my hair in floating spiderwebs around my face. Cicadas were singing among the darkened hills that cradled the narrow road. Massive, gnarled oaks jutted from those hills, their dignity heightened by their blackness against a clouded sky.
    Tomorrow it may rain, I thought.
    Turning the wheel, I rounded a long, sly bend that curved like the crook of a beckoning finger. Bradleyville was now less than ten miles away. Childhood memories rushed me like the shadowed road leaping to life at the wash of my headlights. For some reason I thought of a day twenty-five years before, when I’d dared the biggest jump ever out of the tree swing hanging from a thick branch of a wizened oak in our backyard. I remembered pushing away hard, scraping my fingers against the scratchy rope, the smooth board pulling from my thighs. The air had been warm then also. It whizzed past my ears and shot up my nose, snatching away all breath. Or perhaps my breathing had stopped amid the ecstasy, the sheer freedom, of flying. For a