The House You Pass on the Way Read Online Free PDF

home.”
    “That didn’t stop me from waiting for them. I wasn’t much more than a boy. Probably still believed that if you wished hard enough you could make the impossible happen.” He took his pipe from his back pocket, put it in his mouth, and struck a match to it. Cherry-scented smoke circled them.
    “You never met my friend Hazel,” Staggerlee said.
    Daddy squinted as though he were thinking. “I never met any of your friends and you know it.” He winked at her.
    Staggerlee smiled, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. At first her parents had worried about her social life. But a long time ago, she had convinced them that her harmonica and Creek were enough. That she didn’t need a roomful of friends, like Dotti.
    “Hazel’s the only one, really,” she said. “I mean she used to be.”
    “Used to be?”
    “She’s moving. Her daddy took a job down in Florida. I was thinking she’d come by to say good-bye.”
    Her father looked thoughtful for a moment. They sat for a while without saying anything.
    “Sometimes people don’t get a chance to say good-bye, Stag.”
    He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer to him.
    “I’m always gonna take the time,” she said. “No matter what happens.”
    “That’s good. Always take the time. You really never know when you’re not going to have it anymore.” He stuck his pipe back in his mouth and puffed on it. They sat quietly, staring out at the fields. Staggerlee glanced toward the road.
    “Charlie Horse got a letter today,” she said. “A place for him to study piano opened up at that music camp. He’ll be leaving by the end of the week.”
    “That so,” Daddy said, frowning.
    Staggerlee nodded. All winter Charlie Horse had been waiting for this letter—a full ride to one of the country’s most prestigious music camps. He’d start college straight from there. They probably wouldn’t see him again until Thanksgiving. Staggerlee swallowed. First Hazel, now Charlie Horse. Seemed like this town, their house, was all just something you passed on the way.
    “Why’d you come back to this house, Daddy?” It was getting dark quickly now, and around them, katydids were starting to call out. Inside, she could hear her mother and Charlie Horse getting dinner ready.
    Her father took a long drag on his pipe. “I always knew I’d come back here. This house gets in your blood. I sit on the stairs sometimes and remember Mama on her hands and knees polishing those floors, remember my father outside high up on the ladder laying down shingles. Some mornings I wake up and she’s right in that kitchen taking a pan of biscuits from the stove.”
    He got quiet for a moment.
    “They left this world,” he said softly. “But they never left this house. I had to come back to them.”
    “You think Charlie Horse’ll come back here?”
    “A couple of times probably. The way you and Dotti will after you’re gone. I don’t expect any of you to settle here the way I needed to.”
    Staggerlee stared out at the road, knowing, all at once, that Hazel wasn’t coming, that they had said their good-bye that morning in the school yard over two years ago.
    She leaned against Daddy’s shoulder in the darkness and listened to the river rush past.

Chapter Five
    SCHOOL ENDED ON A THURSDAY AT THE END OF MAY. All the eighth-graders were headed for Sweet Gum High come September, and the girls dressed up that last day in ankle-length dresses and high heels. Maybe they’re practicing for high school, Staggerlee thought, sitting at the top of the school stairs watching them, trying to make themselves feel older, grown-up already.
    Precarious. That was the word that kept coming to mind. The night before, her mother had said it about Battle—that he seemed so precarious when he ran. And now, watching these girls make their way to the school buses and waiting cars, Mama’s word for Battle kept popping into her head. They seemed scared too