The One That I Want Read Online Free PDF Page A

apple-harvesting season or one new factory opening, and the gods would rain down on us. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. Most of us never made our way out of here, content with our lot in life, maybe not the best lot, but still, we’re grateful for what we’ve got. The sign at our city limit that greets travelers, most of whom scamper through without a glance back on their way west to Seattle or east to Boise, implores, WELCOME TO WESTLAKE! STOP AND STAY FOR A WHILE. But none of them do. None of them do stay. It’s the rest of us who stick.
    Darcy was an exception in many ways. For one, she actually left. I begged her not to go, and I watched my father’s face wash with a mix of admiration and heartbreak when she packed up her Toyota and drove off, literally, into the sunset, but there was never any rationalizing with Darcy. So we let her go and hoped that she would find what she was looking for. Or at the very least (and maybe we hoped this more than anything), that she would come back to us.
    For two, Darcy and I, along with our middle sister, Luanne, were fortunate, if you could take the sum of our collective history and actually see it positively, which I choose to do. My father’s store was never impacted by a winter that froze too many crops or a Boeing plant layoff that landed some of our neighbors on the unemployment line. People always craved a new TV, their biweekly paycheck be damned, always needed a new refrigerator when theirs sputtered to an out-of-nowhere death in the middle of August. For many years, early on and then again later, when he recovered from his self-destruction, my father has been a man about town. A member of the Elks Club, a sponsor of a Little Leagueteam, a beloved, gregarious bear with a riotous laugh and a moderately supple bank account that afforded Darcy that Toyota and Tyler and me our two-bedroom-plus-den colonial, which my dad bestowed on us as our wedding gift.
    Tonight, Darcy and I weave past the faded homes, which grow increasingly bleak the farther we trail from my own neighborhood—their front porches dotted with American flags and drying laundry—and I try to forge a bridge with my sister.
    “How long are you here for?” I ask, hoping she’ll say forever, hoping that she’ll finally abandon this incessant need for freedom, for something
“bigger than here!”
(Her words, not mine.)
    “Just another week,” she says, her eyes like lasers out the window.
    “You’re at Dante’s?” I ask.
    “Uh-huh,” she says. “He has a great piano. I can play all night.” Dante Smiley, born Daniel Smiley, changed his name during a passing Goth phase in ninth grade, and the moniker stuck, though he’s now a staid paralegal at the attorney’s office in the strip mall next to Target, and occasionally moonlights as a drummer in Murphy’s Law, a not-even-good-enough-to-be-deemed-garage band that manages monthly-or-so gigs at bars around town. Darcy gutted him the summer of their senior year when she announced she was leaving for Berklee College in Boston in September and had no intention of staying faithful to their two-year romance. And now, whenever she’s back, he flings open his door with a salty mix of hope, redemption, and second chances. The guidance counselor in me thinks he’s perilously naïve, while the sunshiny optimist in me admires his romanticism.
    “How’s it going in L.A., then?” I ask.
    “Fine,” she answers.
    “Any closer to a record deal?” I say gently, as this is usuallythe point in our conversation when Darcy’s temper sparks like a blowtorch.
    She sighs and glances over at me. “Please, Till, I’m tired. Can we not do this now? I’d like to just respect the moment.”
    I nod and smile at my sister, so heartbreakingly young at twenty-three, with so much to unearth. She smiles back, though her eyes are lush with sadness, and it’s all I can do not to release the steering wheel and smother her with every ounce of