Homesick Creek Read Online Free PDF

hard-ons. She’d finally conceded that he didn’t have to wear the pajama tops, just the bottoms. Every six months, like acid in an open wound, she got him a brand-new pair at JC Penney.
    Hack absently sifted the change in his pocket, watching the showroom window weep and flex in the wind. When he drove to work this morning, the Hubbard coast guard station had already hoisted the storm flag, a black square on an orange ground, the third storm warning this season, and it was still only just December. When he drove by Hubbard Elementary on his way to work, seagulls were already gathering on the athletic field a block back from the beach. You could always predict the weather by watching seagulls. He’d probably have a hell of a ride going home over Cape Mano, the headland between Hubbard and Sawyer. It didn’t matter; he had a heavy, muscular truck that could withstand any wind. He might just stop at the little overlook, see if any fishing boats were making a run for the harbor. Coming through the Jaws on a storm sea was a chancy thing even for experienced skippers like old Nate Jensen or Jordie Nelson. Anyone younger and the coast guard would have its boys out in the surf, fighting like hell to bring the boat in.
    A year ago, maybe a year and a half, Hack had spent the night in his truck at the Cape Mano overlook. It hunkered down at the very lip of a thousand-foot cliff; if you looked out instead of straight down, you could almost be flying. He’d tucked himself into a sleeping bag inside the cab and felt every little gust and blow, watched the halogen lights appear and disappear as fishing boats bucked and yawed out near the horizon. He’d told Bunny he was at a regional sales meeting over in Eugene. He still didn’t know why he’d taken such a risk; the overlook was screened from the highway by only a ratty fringe of coastal pines. If it had been daylight, someone would have seen him there and recognized him right away, his truck’s being one of a kind with all its toys and extras, the winch and Playboy mud flaps, the radar detector and CB antenna. If she’d found out he was really spending the night in his truck just three miles from home, she would have been mad as hell, and he could never have explained it. He’d done it anyway, told his little lie, had his night out, and in the morning he’d gone to work like it was just another day.
    As a sudden plague of hailstones overtook the passing traffic, Hack heard Rae pock-pock-pocking up behind him in her expensive high-heeled shoes. Her perfume wrapped itself around him like sin. He smelled it even in his dreams; sometimes at night he buried his head in the dirty laundry hamper in the hope that some of it might be clinging somehow to one of his shirts—not that it ever did. Before he knew her, he’d never known anyone who’d worn perfume like that. Bunny’s perfume was some sweet cheap thing she’d gotten in Hawaii two years ago and wore only when she was going out with her girlfriends.
    Rae Macy. Rae Macy was the most exotic woman Hack Neary had ever known. Long-necked and white-haired at twenty-nine, she walked straight and tall and light on her feet as though she were connected directly to heaven—the walk of a ballerina, maybe; the walk of a courtesan. She didn’t talk like other people either. Complicated words and sentences spilled out of her like expensive candy, and when she told a story, she could have been reading a book out loud. Half the time Hack had no idea what she was talking about, something he found unnerving, him being a bluff talker himself.
    She came around to stand right beside him now, the length of her arm lightly touching his. No one else was in the showroom.
    “Hi,” she said softly.
    “Hi.” He kept looking out the window instead of at her, but it was a hollow gesture. She had him. He bet she knew she had him.
    “You okay?” she asked.
    “Sure.”
    “Yes?”
    She did that, asked questions twice if she thought he wasn’t