The Buffalo Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt, always, considerably older. She stopped in mid-turn and tried to remember what it was that she wanted to do next. Clear away the catalogs that had come with the mail? Set the table? Pour Alfred's milk?
    No, the casserole needed forty minutes in the oven. If she poured his milk now, it would be warm when they sat down to eat. Maybe she should get the carrots up from the basement. They still had summer carrots left in the sand barrel.
    She wished she had remembered to ask Alfred about his day at school. What he'd done, who he'd talked to. What they'd studied in social studies or history. Anything. Even whether he'd done his homework.
    She wished, she decided simply, that she wasn't so out of practice at this, she wished there was some sort of muscle memory that went with parenting. She knew she hadn't wanted him to wander up to the cemetery right now--except for school, when he wasn't in her sight she grew worried and frightened--but she also wasn't sure she could have stopped him (or, for that matter, whether she should have). If she told him to stay around the house, she feared he would just ignore her and go anyway. He had done that a couple of times when Terry wasn't home. He'd treated her like she was a giant paper doll and simply disregarded whatever she'd said.
    The worst had been that Saturday morning in early October when he hitchhiked to Burlington. Just up and left, and thumbed rides the thirty-plus miles to the city to see that girl named Tien and--if he could--find some apparently loathsome teenager named Digger. When he got to the apartment where the girl lived, however, he discovered that she, too, had a new home, and her old foster father wouldn't say where. The man had called Social Services and the boy had been brought back to Cornish, and no one that day had looked very good. Certainly, Laura believed, she hadn't. And yet she had offered to set up a play date with the girl, hadn't she? And Alfred had declined. Afterward, he insisted he no longer had any interest in anyone he'd known in Burlington, and--she had to admit--from the little she knew of those friends, she was glad.
    She wondered now if the real reason why she didn't want Alfred at the cemetery was her fear that he'd find the girls' graves. She wasn't sure why this idea disturbed her, but it did.
    She would have called Terry at the shack his family used as a deer camp so she could hear his voice, but there wasn't a telephone. And, of course, there wasn't a tower nearby, so the cell phone wouldn't function.
    She tried not to be angry with Terry for going hunting, but it was inescapable: She was mad. Alfred had only been with them a couple of months, and they were all still getting to know one another. Figure each other out. And Terry had gone off to deer camp Friday night, as if it were just any other November, and he wouldn't be back until tomorrow. Tuesday.
    Reflexively, she looked up at the Humane Society calendar on the corkboard on the kitchen wall. Terry had been gone a weekend and a day. She'd spoken to him twice when he called from the pay phone at the general store near the neglected cabin they called their camp, but neither time had Alfred been home, and so neither time had he and the boy connected.
    She and Terry hadn't discussed it, but she knew the only reason he was going to be back tomorrow was that Wednesday was the anniversary of the twins' deaths. Two years now. Far enough in the past that whole hours might pass without her thinking about them.
    Had last year not been a leap year, the anniversary would have been Tuesday. Tomorrow.
    She went to the den, a small room that faced north and so it was dark even at noon in the peak of the summer, and took a photo album out from a cabinet in the bookshelf a previous owner had built into the wall. Long ago she had taken down all the photos of the girls that once hung on the walls or sat on tables and bureaus in frames, because she couldn't bear to be reminded of them every moment. She