Souvenir Read Online Free PDF Page A

it meant nothing.
    “I
guess
I’ll go to Grandpa’s,” Savannah said when the song ended. “Oh, we have our opening ball game Sunday at one. I told Dad; he said he has a nine thirty tee time with some client, so you’ll have to take me.”
    Of course. When Brian wasn’t jetting off to some branch or another of the company he’d founded, Hamilton Investments Management, Inc., he was on the golf course. He rarely involved himself in their lives—ironic, considering he’d once been so determined to win her away from Carson that he and his father had spent $387,000 to close the deal.
    He just wasn’t the sort of man who wanted intimacy, in the fullest sense of the word. What was surface level was uncomplicated and therefore desirable; he saved his energies for work. He was about accomplishments. Results. The successful pursuit of an ever-higher standard. He collected achievements the way other people accrue trophies. She admired his energy but was cowed by it too; he expected the same from everyone around him and, especially lately, she didn’t have it to give.
    “Well, whether Dad comes with us or not,” Meg said, “Grandpa will be glad to see you; he wants to show you around—‘show her off,’ that’s how he put it.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s his new home, the people there are his new neighbors—he wants them to see his beautiful offspring.”
    “Which would be
you,
or Aunt Beth,” Savannah said. “Not me.
I’m
not beautiful; I got Dad’s big nose.”
    Perhaps
, Meg thought. Savannah’s nose did look something like Brian’s, and the shape of her face was similar, too; the broad forehead, the wide smile. Meg wouldn’t bet her life on a genetic connection, though. She said, “
You
are absolutely gorgeous. I’d give anything for that wavy hair.” She wanted to reach over and touch Savannah’s long auburn hair, willed her tired arm to cooperate. Happily, it did, and she pushed some strands behind her daughter’s ear, letting her hand linger. Carson’s low, soulful voice sang one of his early ballads, a song about a pair of young lovers separated by a washed-out bridge.
    “Hey, two hands on the wheel,” Savannah said.
    In the darkness, Meg allowed herself a wistful smile.

Six
    S AVANNAH PASSED THE NINETY MINUTES BEFORE HER ONLINE “DATE” BY working on a new song. Her guitar, a fifteenth-birthday gift almost a year ago, made a good diversion most nights, especially now that her grandparents’ horse farm was sold. But last Sunday, while she was chatting online with her friends, she got a message from someone intriguing. A guy—no, a
man
—who wanted to get to know her. And at nine thirty tonight he would be online to chat with her again…she hoped.
    She sat on her fuzzy purple stool, trying to improve the final three bars of her song. The purple, the fuzz, annoyed her. Nothing in her bedroom suite felt like “her” anymore; her
life
didn’t feel like “her” anymore. She’d outgrown the lavender walls and spring-green carpet, the white dressers and desk. Her fuchsia curtains, with their bright appliquéd daisies, annoyed her. A lot of things annoyed her, in fact: most of her classmates, her dad’s refusal to let her get a dog even to keep outside, the stares of the creepy lawn-care guys, the way she still wasn’t allowed to stay home alone when her parents traveled, as if she couldn’t be trusted—just to name a few. It was all so
irritating
, like a cloud of gnats she couldn’t shoo away. Even this song, which she’d been so dedicated to at first, was getting on her nerves; she just couldn’t seem to get it to end the way she wanted it to.
    Finally, at nine twenty, she gave up trying to concentrate and propped the guitar against the wall, wishing there was some way to fast-forward to a time when she had her own life, her own place. Space that was decorated by her, not by some fussy designer who thought she knew “just what smart little girls like!” Someplace like a park