Hearts Read Online Free PDF

headed for the highway and drove more than one hundred miles to Slatesville, Pennsylvania, where she’d been born and where she had lived until she was eighteen. She had not been back there since 1974, when her mother died. There was no reason to go back, no family or friendly attachments. It was the sort of place you left right after high school, so that the population slowly diminished, even during the post-World War II baby boom. And among those who stayed, Linda couldn’t think of anyone now with whom she’d had more than a glancing relationship. Slatesville was simply an arbitrary choice for this trial run.
    The trip was eventless, except for a close call with a tractor trailer near the Interstate entrance at Lebanon, and she arrived in the center of town before eleven o’clock. It looked the same, yet somewhat altered in a tricky way. Had they moved the railroad tracks slightly to the north? Of course, some of the signs over the double row of shops showed change of ownership, and the face of the bank had been sandblasted to a snowy brilliance.
    Linda parked in front of the Station Diner and went inside for coffee. She didn’t know anyone there, not the middle-aged woman behind the counter, who was carefully building a pyramid of pastries, or the two men bent in conversation at the only occupied booth. She was relieved. What if someone said, “Linda Marie Camisko! What in the world are you doing back here?”
    She drank her coffee and got into the car again. Then, just to test her memory and her sense of direction, she drove down Sweetwater Avenue, past the high school, past the mills, to Roper Street, in search of herold house. It was a gray wooden structure, built in the late twenties, with a circular wooden porch and a monumental tree in the yard that used to cast all the front rooms in darkness and keep the porch railings sticky with sap and bird droppings.
    There it was, just as remembered, except for a sign on a pole that announced it as The Maple Inn. Guests. TV. Meals.
    The landlady had been a practical nurse, like Linda’s mother, and they had rented four rooms on the second floor from her. Her name was Piner, Mrs. Loretta, and her husband, like Linda’s father, worked at the asbestos spinning mill a mile away. They had no children, but there used to be a frenetic white dog they kept chained outdoors. Mrs. Piner did her practical nursing at home, taking in the elderly and giving them dinner and baths and all the other things they could no longer manage for themselves. Linda recalled those frightened and frightening wraiths in bathrobes, encountered on the stairs, and the moans that came from the large hall bathroom, where Mrs. Piner was cutting someone’s toenails. She would have gone right to the quick.
    She wore white uniforms and nurse’s shoes even though she worked in her own home. A long time before that, though, she’d been a baby nurse, like Linda’s mother, who stayed for a few weeks at a time in the homes of wealthy Harrisburg families to care for newborn infants.
    Linda parked the car and went up the porch steps, sounding herself for nostalgia. There wasn’t any. Of course she had been miserably unhappy much of the time here: that sad parade of displaced persons, hermother’s frequent absences, her father’s constant raging presence after the emphysema kept him housebound. And then his terrible death. There had been some private moments of ecstasy, but they had occurred in the palace of the imagination rather than in the narrow perimeters of the house. She had only dreamed here.
    No one was sitting on the green-painted porch chairs, and peering through the rippled panel of yellow glass in the door, she saw a dim distortion of the front hall, unbroken by human shadow. As a child, she’d had a habit of scaring herself. What if it was Frankenstein who
really
had the room next to the downstairs kitchen instead of poor Mr. Botts, who was so frail and confused? What if those heavy footsteps