The Longings of Wayward Girls

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Book: The Longings of Wayward Girls Read Online Free PDF
Author: Karen Brown
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Psychological, Thrillers, Contemporary Women
parties on nights like these—the passing of a bottle around the bonfire, some boy’s arm heavy on her shoulder. The road is quiet and empty, and their voices are too-sharp and high against the emptiness. ray pulls out a pack of cigarettes and offers her one. “I quit,” she says. “A long time ago.” He must see her rings, notice the sUV with the elementary school magnet stuck to the side. she knows she should tell him about her children, Max, four, and sylvia, seven, about her husband, Craig, the three of them waiting at home for the ice cream that sits, melting, on the passenger seat. but she is suddenly embarrassed by this evidence of who she’s turned out to be. she is thrown back to a time when she expected to be so much more.
“what have you been up to?” she asks him.
ray shrugs. He gives her that lopsided grin. “same old thing. Music.”
He joined a band she’d never heard of and went off to make records and tour after graduating from prep school. Her memories of ray end then. she hated high school, was lost, a faceless person in the beige hallways. every moment of her time there focused on clever schemes of escape—forged notes from the nurse to cover skipped classes; day trips with older boyfriends to newport, rhode Island, or driving around in their cars drinking; having sex in their boyhood bedrooms, all of them stuck, somehow, within the grid of the town— mechanics, shop workers, lightning rod installers. And then she got out and tried college to appease her father—three semesters of courses at a staid women’s college, in large lecture halls where she once again felt overwhelmed by namelessness, where the girls all knew each other, and where her ability to memorize the details of hundreds of slides of art, and construct and support an eloquent thesis, brought her excellent grades but no appreciation of her own achievement. she hated it too much to stay, eventually getting a job at lord & Taylor, selling men’s accessories behind a counter—scarves and gloves and beautiful wallets. Across the shining aisle the women in cosmetics stood like mannequins with their garish faces. she had to carry her personal items into the store in a clear plastic tote and at the end of the day pass through the security exit like a thief. once she met Craig the promise of a new life took over, with its babies to tend, its house—swatches of fabric, paint samples, like the dollhouse she’d decorated as a child, spending hours, sewing miniature curtains cut from her mother’s discarded cocktail dresses.
“It’s been a long time,” ray says then. “Twenty years?”
sadie admits it might be longer. “what are you doing back?”
ray stares at her. He says his father has died, and sadie realizes she has been cocooned in her own grief, that she has not read a newspaper or left the house for anything but errands in weeks. ray tells her he’s staying at wappaquasset, where beth still lives with their mother. He says that they want him to take over the farm and the store, and sadie tries to remember the last time she stopped at Filley’s, ray’s father always so kind to her—giving the children apples, tiny pumpkins, putting extra ears of corn in the bag, adding a Christmas wreath for free when they bought their tree.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. she puts her hand to her chest.
ray stares at her again. she cannot fathom what he’s thinking. He reaches out his hand and brushes a piece of her hair from her face, gently, tenderly. she smells the cigarette, the gasoline. later that evening, folding the children’s clothes, stacking them in small piles, loading the dishwasher, locking the doors of her house, the street outside shining and black from rain, the neighbor’s porch lights halos on the front walks, she thinks of his hand moving toward her face, the way he looked at her, and it’s as if something dormant has sprung from the ordered dignity of her married life.
    June 12, 1979
     
    I
    n Hamlet Hill the
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