Heading Out to Wonderful Read Online Free PDF

up, nobody could say for sure. There are some things boys just know.
    At the end of Charlie’s first work week, on a Friday in late August, 1948, a woman walked into the shop, and that’s when the story becomes more than just another story, becomes instead a tale that’s passed down from father to son as a warning, from mother to daughter in that year when the daughter first begins to dream of romance, the kind of romance seen in the flickering light of the movie screen: The lights go down, the movie starts, the silent flicker as the frames go through the sprockets, and even the most ordinary gesture becomes extraordinary. Everything stops, and something you can’t explain begins.
    The bell over the door jangled, everybody turned to see who was coming in, the way they always did. She walked silently into the butcher shop, and everybody stared at her and they didn’t turn away and start talking again, the way they usually did, and nobody, not one woman, said a word of greeting to her.
    Charlie had never seen her, not once, and he thought he’d seen everybody. It was obvious she was different from the other women. She had a country face, young, probably not much more than twenty, if that. She wore a wedding band and an engagement ring, so that much was clear, but she looked as though she had stepped into the shop from another part of the world, from one of the cities Charlie had visited during his days and nights of travel.
    She wore a white linen dress, it was still before Labor Day, and such things still mattered then, a white dress with an olive green belt at the trim waist, the neckline cut low with a certain sophistication and style that said she had not bought it anywhere near Brownsburg. Her lips were a crimson slash, her hair pulled up in gleaming blonde waves on top of her head, held with tortoiseshell combs studded with rhinestones. She wore dark sunglasses, a thing no other woman in the town even thought to own, and espadrilles, tied with grosgrain ribbons around her ankles, on her small feet.
    Her only other jewelry was a small gold cross she wore around her neck on a delicate chain, and she carried a small green leather bag under her arm.
    She walked quickly into the center of the store, and nobody said a word to her. Charlie stopped slicing the pork chops he was cutting for Helen Anderson, and wiped the blade of his knife with a clean cloth. It glinted in the light as he laid it quietly on the counter.
    Will, sitting in his chair with the boy on his lap, finally broke the silence and the stillness. He greeted her softly as he stood up and put the boy down on the floor, “Morning, Sylvan. How’re you doing? How’s Boaty?”
    “We’re fine,” she said. “It’s lovely. Everything’s just the same as always.”
    She had a sweet, girlish voice. She couldn’t have been much more than a teenager. She didn’t sound like she was from around Brownsburg. She spoke in some faraway accent, like a princess, or an actress.
    She took off her dark glasses, very slowly, bowing her head to do it, gentle, graceful. She looked up at Will briefly, nodding hello. Then she just stood, and she turned her head slowly to stare at Charlie Beale. Five seconds. Ten, maybe, no more, but it seemed forever.
    His hands were on the counter. He felt the urge to do something, to wipe the butcher block, to jingle the change in his pocket, but nobody moved, and he didn’t either.
    “May I help you, ma’am? Is there . . . ?”
    “No. No thank you. I’m not hungry for anything.” She spoke with the sort of fake English accent Charlie had only heard in the movies, those glowing women on the screen with the sparkling hair and the black lips.
    Five seconds.
    “At the moment. Not hungry at the moment.”
    Then she turned and headed for the door. The bell tinkled as she left, and she shielded her eyes for a brief moment in the sudden brightness of the street. She put her dark glasses back on and let herself into a black Cadillac,