Kiss Her Goodbye Read Online Free PDF Page B

oncoming traffic on ice-slicked Transit Road.
    Kathleen was in the car with her mother; buckled in the backseat on the passenger’s side of the car, she was pulled from the accident without a scratch. Barely eight years old. So young; too young, really, to remember. Surely the images—flashing red lights, flames, grim-faced strange men, whirling snow against the night sky—have been conjured by her imagination. She was in shock, after all—so traumatized after witnessing her mother’s death that she didn’t speak for weeks.
    This she knows because Aunt Maggie told her. Mom’s twin sister came from Chicago after the accident. There was a wake; a funeral, too. But no open casket. Pinned behind the steering wheel, Mollie Gallagher had been incinerated when the gas tank exploded as rescuers worked to free her. Burned alive, fully conscious, Kathleen later found out. By the grace of God, she doesn’t remember.
    Aunt Maggie claims she wanted to bring Kathleen back to Chicago with her. But Dad wouldn’t allow it. Dad, a middle-aged steelworker, insisted that Kathleen stay with him. Why, she’ll never understand. As the years unfolded, he rarely looked at her, rarely spoke to her.
    â€œIt’s because you’re the image of your mother, Katie,” Aunt Maggie would say in her faint brogue on the rare occasions Dad allowed her to visit. “It hurts him to see all he lost every time he looks at you.”
    Then why wouldn’t he let me go? Why wouldn’t he let me live with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Geoff and the cousins?
    That she could have been raised in a loving home with four children, hugs, and laughter still stings after all these years. A home where somebody tucked you in at night when you were little—and cared what time you came in at night when you were older.
    If Dad had let her go, so much would have been different.
    But if things were different, she wouldn’t have Jen.
    â€œSo . . . wings?” Matt asks, his recliner squeaking as he raises it to the upright position again.
    â€œWith extra blue cheese,” she tells him, smiling as he walks into the kitchen.
    I’m so lucky. Lucky to have him, and the kids, and this house. Kathleen looks around the cozy family room, which she spent two hours cleaning this afternoon. She admires the burgundy leather sofa and chairs, the butter-colored rug with fresh vacuum marks in it, the creamy, textured beige walls she painted herself using a rag technique she saw on one of those cable decorating shows.
    Maeve laughed when she popped over that day and found Kathleen on her hands and knees, covered in paint.
    â€œYou can hire somebody to do that, you know.”
    â€œI don’t want to. It’s fun.”
    Fun, for Maeve, involves salons and personal trainers.
    She’s always trying to get Kathleen to pamper herself more. Lately, she’s been telling her that she needs to hire a housekeeper, though Kathleen protests that she finds cleaning therapeutic.
    â€œThat alone is evidence that you need therapy,” Maeve declared.
    Somehow, though, they’re friends. Still friends, or friends again, depending on how you look at it. There were a few years when Kathleen lost track of her, along with everyone else from her old life in suburban Buffalo—Dad included. But you can’t run away forever.
    Rather, you can . . . but you might discover that you don’t want to after all. You might conclude, when enough time and distance have buried the old hurts, and your husband has been offered his dream job at a Fortune 500 corporation in, of all places, your hometown, that it’s time to stop running.
    So.
    So Matt accepted the job, and here they are. And everything is fine, after all.
    She doesn’t face unpleasant memories on a daily basis. She’s stopped worrying that somebody is going to look at her and know .
    What about Jen?
    What if somebody—
    But that’s ridiculous. That