The Bright Forever Read Online Free PDF

pie tin. Tubby was smoking his pipe. Lottie and Leo stepped out onto their porch, Lottie with her hair curled and piled up on top of her head, Leo still holding a hand of playing cards. Clare knew they’d all been playing euchre or pinochle. They’d been cracking jokes. Even now they were laughing. Tubby had to take his pipe away from his mouth, he was laughing so hard, and Lottie’s elaborate hairdo was wobbling. “Now, that’s rich.” Thelma beat the pie tin against her leg. “Did you hear that, Tubby? My God.”
    It hadn’t been so long ago that Clare and Bill had been a part of their neighbors’ card games and ice cream suppers, but after Bill died, Clare knew that what she had long suspected was indeed true. It had always been Bill’s company that people like Thelma and Tubby, Lottie and Leo had valued, not hers. Before he got sick, Bill had an easy way about him. He liked good food and good jokes. He had a tattoo of a mermaid on his right bicep, and often when they were over at a neighbor’s house, he rolled up his shirtsleeve, flexed his muscle, and made that mermaid wiggle and dance. “That’s Clare, dancing the hootchy-kootchy,” he said, and it made her face burn when everyone laughed as if they thought dancing the hootchy-kootchy was the last thing in the world skinny old plain-faced Clare would do. There she was, her chest caved in, her shoulders slumped, and there was the mermaid, all breasts and hips, all curves and long, flowing hair. When Clare heard everyone hoot and laugh, she wanted to go home and never come back. “Honestly,” she told Bill one night. “I wish I never had to set foot in those people’s houses again.”
    Now she had her wish. For a while after Bill died, neighbors like Thelma and Lottie stopped in to bring her a recipe from the
Evening Register
or to ask her if she’d like to come along to a Rebekkahs lodge meeting or to the Top Hat Inn for a bottle of beer and some songs on the jukebox, but she was shy without Bill to ease the way for her, and more often than not she said she had sewing to do or a TV program she wanted to watch, and then she took up with Ray, and soon the invitations stopped.
    She was thinking about the purple martins that evening and how they came each spring to Mr. Dees’s apartment houses as she watched the Carls and the Markses and listened to their cackles and guffaws. “Oh, God,” Thelma kept saying. “Oh, God. Stop, stop. You’ll make me pee my pants.” Folks needed to be together. As much as she hated hearing Thelma—as much as she hated seeing her and Lottie and Tubby and Leo having so much fun—she also longed to be a part of it the way she did when she was a schoolgirl and harbored secret crushes on the girls with bright, pretty faces. She loved the way they called to one another in the hallways, their voices gay and confident: “Hey, Flo. Hey, Teep. What’s the dope?” She knew she would never be one of those girls. She was too timid, too ordinary. But that didn’t stop her from wanting their company.
    Ray came down the road carrying his stepladder. Clare heard the ladder, toted at his side, dragging now and then over the macadam road. She felt the weight of the ladder in her own arms and how difficult it would be, if someone was bone tired, to keep it balanced so the tip of a leg wouldn’t dip and scrape. She knew Ray was worn out. He’d come home that evening and said, “I’m give in.” He was working concrete on a new hospital construction in Jasper. Some days, after work, he drove over to Patoka Lake and fished for bluegill, but on this night he had come straight home—“all used up,” he’d said, “and no place to throw me away.”
    When Mr. Dees came to ask him to help with the birdhouse, Clare tried to convince Ray to let it go for another time when he wasn’t so tired—“You take it easy, hon,” she told him—but he said he didn’t reckon it’d kill him to do Mr. Dees a good turn. “I can’t help but feel