Summerlong Read Online Free PDF

blowing of course—in one’s mind, the sex one didn’t have is always mind blowing—but what kind of trajectory her life might have had. Would she have ever returned to Iowa? Had children? Finished a second book?
    Her thoughts return to the man who had given her a beer at the Kum & Go: she had known him before, years ago, as a teenager. He was heavier then, a cherubic face and a softer, pudgy build. But she had seen him in something—Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a disastrously ambitious production at the local high school, when they had just moved back to Grinnell. It would have been maybe thirteen years ago. He had played Astrov, and even at sixteen—so he was twenty-nine now—he had perfected the weary weight of middle-age ennui. She remembers him giving a speech in a tight tweed jacket and having been moved by it. So he’s back, she thinks, and she wonders why, why do people seem to come back here? And then she dozes out there on the deck, asleep in the nude, outside, almost hoping somebody finds her and is scandalized.
    Among the things mothers don’t do: they don’t leave the house first in the morning, without explanation. Fathers can do this. They can blame work or a need to hit the gym or an early meeting or a doctor’s appointment and be gone before the family wakes up; but mothers need to be seen in the morning, present, directing the day’s traffic.
    But when she wakes up on the back deck, still before dawn, Claire can think of no good reason to stay home. What kind of life is this? When you cannot leave the house if you want to leave the house. She’s awake again, alone in the early morning, four thirty, and the kids will sleep almost four more hours . Her husband’s still asleep too, it seems, in the basement, in front of the television.
    She goes to the kitchen in her robe and flips on the coffeemaker. She hesitates to do this, because she worries the simple smell of coffee might wake her husband, and she wants solitude, but she wants coffee too. Isn’t that her life though, now, at thirty-eight? A storm of competing desires, one threatening to ruin the other?
    She waits for the coffee to brew, just enough for one large mug of it, and she surveys the kitchen, a disaster. The dishes from last night’s supper stacked in the sink, the butter dish left out, rancid and liquid now on the kitchen island. Four empty beer bottles (Don’s) and a mostly empty bottle of Tempranillo (hers) near the sink. Fruit flies flit around the remnants of the wine. The trash can in the corner full, brimming over with a dozen gnawed-on ears of corn and bare bones.
    She sets her coffee mug in the disgusting sink, goes into the downstairs bathroom, puts on a hint of makeup, brushes her teeth, drops her robe, and slides on a navy blue sundress, which she finds in a pile of clean laundry she dumped, two days ago, on the family room couch. She has no clean underwear. It is all upstairs in the three baskets of laundry she has yet to put away. If she goes upstairs, she might wake one of the kids, and then slipping out would be out of the question.
    Fine, she thinks. It’s hot.
    She walks out the front door and leaves.
    Her husband will wake up later and find her gone. He’ll look around at the kitchen and then panic. The chaos of his life will seem insurmountable. How to give the children breakfast in such a filthy kitchen? And how will he get them all ready for the day, while he arranges showings of his newest listings? How will he shit, shave, and shower, his morning rituals, if he’s alone with the kids?
    How many times, Claire thinks, in the past twelve years, has she forgone those three simple dignities of the mornings to care for the children, or how often has she done those things with a child in the bathroom watching her, crying, whining, or asking a million cheerful and relentless questions as she tried to take a shit.
    She would come home and find him fuming, though he would say, “No, no, it’s okay.”
    She goes to