Our Souls at Night Read Online Free PDF

That’s ignorant.
    What is it, then?
    It’s some kind of decision to be free. Even at our ages.
    You’re acting like a teenager.
    I never acted like this as a teenager. I never dared anything. I did what I was supposed to. You’ve done too much of that yourself, if I can say so. I wish you would find somebody who’s a self-starter. Somebody who would go to Italy with you and get up on a Saturday morning and take you up in the mountains and get snowed on and come home and be filled up with it all.
    I hate it when you talk like this. Let me be, Daddy. I’ll live my own life.
    That goes for both of us. Can we make a pact on that? A peace.
    I still think you should think about this.
    I have, and I like it.
    Hell, Daddy.
    —
    The next day a call came for Holly. She told Louis about it.
    It was Julie Newcomb. Just like Linda Rogers, she had to tell me about you. I said I already knew. I said, But I’m glad you called. I was thinking about you the other day. I was out in a restaurant and ordered lamb. It made me wonder if your husband’s still fucking sheep. She said, Fuck you, bitch, I was doing you a favor. Then she hung up.
    That was pretty fast thinking on your part.
    Oh, I never could stand her. But it’s still embarrassing.
    Well, honey, that’ll have to be your problem, not mine. I told you, I’m not embarrassed. Neither is Addie Moore.

14
    In the end I came to admire some of her qualities, Louis said. She was a good person, with a definite inner direction. She wouldn’t do what others expected of her. We were pretty poor some of those years in the beginning, but she never wanted a career. She had her own ideas. She wanted her independence. I don’t know if it made her happy, though. People talk about life being a journey now, so you could say that was what she was doing. She had a number of women friends here. They would get together at someone’s house and talk about their lives and what women wanted. She talked about us, I’m sure. Women’s liberation was just coming on big then. But we had some other problems too. And it was at least interesting to me that I would be taking care of Holly at night while her mother was at somebody else’s house complaining to her friends about me. It seemed a little ironic. And there was that time with Tamara.
    I thought you said she forgave that, Addie said.
    I think she did. I think she wanted me back at the time. But I’m sure it came up in their talks. I could tell her friends thought differently about me. But she loved Holly. From the beginning. They were very close. Diane confided in her at an early age. I thought it wasn’t right, talking to her that way, telling everything. But she did anyway. She kept Holly drawn in to her.
    You haven’t said how you met.
    Oh. Well, we met like you say you and Carl did. We met in college in Fort Collins. We got married after we both graduated. She was a beautiful young woman. We didn’t know anything about making a home or setting up a house. She’d never done any cooking growing up or much housework, her mother did all that. I grew up here in Holt.
    Yes, I know that.
    For a couple years after we graduated, I was teaching in a little school on the Front Range and when a job opened up in the high school here they hired me and I came back home and have been here ever since. Forty-seven years now. We had Holly, and as I say Diane didn’t go to work when she might have after Holly started school.
    I didn’t really have a career either.
    You worked. I know you did.
    But not at a career like you’ve had. I was a secretary and receptionist in Carl’s office for a year or so but we got on each other’s nerves being together all day and then again at home at night. It was too much time together so I worked at the bank for a while and then in the city offices as a clerk. I’m sure you know that. It was the longest job I had. I saw and heard all kinds of things there. What people will do. What kind of trouble they get into. It was