That Night Read Online Free PDF

chewed. They would call good night to each other as Sheryl went inside and Angie walked back to her own house alone.
    There was a sadness in Sheryl’s voice as she called to her friend, one that I associated then with her father’s death but that I’m certain now had more to do with her reluctance to see the evening end, to see the children disappear and the lights come on in the houses all up and down the street-lights that would burn her eyes when she stepped inside, that would flatten the room’s tables and chairs and make the green living room walls seem as discouraging as the triumph of stupid people. Reluctance to hand over a summer evening to small stuffy rooms and a television and the company of two” lonely widows when it is only nine o’clock (Sheryl’s mother was strict about her daughter’s hours) and the boy you would like to love will be free in the wide world until eleven or twelve.
    Sometime in July it must have been, in the deeper, stiller days of the season, Sheryl came home in a car just about the time my parents and I were getting ready to go in. It was a sleek, navy-blue Chevy, and with its motor running, it seemed to tremble by the curb in front of her house as if it thrilled to the significance of this event as much as she did. She let herself out, bent to say something to the driver we had caught him just briefly as the door opened and the light went on inside: a boy, in sunglasses—and then with a wave of her hand she ran across the lawn to her door. The car tooted its horn, leaped to a start, screeched to a stop at our corner and then tooted again as it took off down the street.
    That was the last we saw of Angie.
    On Saturday night, when the car returned and Rick got out, my mother said, “Oh, Sheryl has a date,” and I should remind her the next time she tells me the chosen Miss America isn’t nearly as pretty as the one who looked like Sheryl that she had said it with a kind of gratitude, as if the girl deserved it, after all she had been through, as if the boy were merely being kind. Late in that summer, just before school started, I brought my pajamas and my pillow to Diane Rossi’s house. We stayed awake through most of the Late Show, and when we heard the car pull up outside, we turned off the television and crawled over the bed to the window. Kneeling on our pillows, we could see them walk toward Sheryl’s house. Rick had his arm across her shoulder. She held the hand he had draped there. At her steps, they kissed again (it was the first time we’d seen them kiss, but even at that age we knew it was again). I remember how painfully her head seemed to bend back as he leaned over her. She climbed the steps, but after she’d opened her front door, she turned and came back down again. She paused above him.
    He pressed his face into her chest and she wrapped her thin arms around his head. In the yellow pool of light from her hallway they were nearly silhouettes. Only a bit of light caught his shoe, the pale material of his shirt, her white arms. Delicately, she turned her head, touching her cheek to his hair. She seemed to sigh or, with a dancer’s grace, to softly lift her body and settle it down again with one breath. Then, abruptly, she threw her head back, his face still pressed to her breasts, and looked straight up at the sky. Some light from a neighbor’s house seemed to penetrate the fine ends of her ratted hair, seemed to touch her throat and her forehead.
    She bent her head again, dipped it back into the shadows, kissed his forehead and lips and throat in a kind of blessing, turned and went inside.
    He moved quickly once she had closed the door and again tapped his horn as he pulled away, setting someone’s dog barking.
    Diane and I sank down into our pillows. We could feel the warm night air on our faces. We could smell the summer dust on the windowsill. We could hear her brother, Billy, his summers numbered, snoring in the next room. I think we must have gone right to