The Solace of Leaving Early Read Online Free PDF Page A

perhaps never again, say yes to me. Make this easy. I want you to go with me. You grew up with Alice Baker; her mother lives right across the street, for heaven’s sake, and,
and
it’s the polite thing to do.”
    Langston clenched her jaws against her own conflictedness until she thought her teeth might crack. Of course some part of her wanted to say yes; of course she wanted to be easy for her mother, but there was another part, a whole other side that stayed hard and resistant. She was afraid to give in, ever, for fear that all personal standards would be abrogated at once. Each time she tried to compromise or broker some emotional bargain with her mother, she saw again in her mind a nightmare figure she’d invented for the occasion, a dark figure riding into town like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She called him Squander, and his sole purpose on this earth was to make Langston behave.
    “I can’t, I can’t,” she said, and immediately felt desperate, chattery and crystalline. “I can’t bear it, the horror of that church and those tragic, large people and the look on their faces, that stunned look, and I never really knew Alice, did I, we played together
briefly,
when we were very
small,
and the hymns, and the weeping, the handkerchiefs, the eulogy, please. Don’t get me started. I don’t want to hear how Alice is sending us a postcard from heaven saying ‘Wish you were here!’ or how she fulfilled the greatest ambition of a woman’s life, mothering, or how Jesus is waiting to gather us all in like little sheep. No. Absolutely not.” She finally had to sit on her hands to keep from waving them in the air like someone drowning.
    Her mother sighed, but didn’t move. “I,” she began, then stopped, taking a deep breath. “I’ve tried to tell you, I’ve begun to tell you half a dozen times about our new minister, Amos. I don’t understand why you won’t
listen
to me, Langston. He’s wonderful, he would never—”
    “He would never have come to Haddington if he was wonderful, that’s
a;
and
b,
he’s the minister for a failed nondenominational Christian church that’s become, what? The Brotherhood? Is it some kind of cult? And he—tell me again—he floats around to churches that need him, like a spore? No, thank you. I’ve been to that church a thousand times and I’ve heard the sermons of six different ministers, and they are
soul-sucking,
Mama, they pull my soul right out of my body and devour it with their banality and their, their inability to perform a close reading of a text.”
    “Langston, he went to seminary at—”
    “I don’t care.”
    “He wrote his thesis on—”
    “I’m not listening.”
    Her mother stood up quickly, more quickly than she usually moved. “It’s ten o’clock now. Two hours, Langston. The funeral is at noon. You have two hours to grow up.” She turned around and stomped down the stairs, slamming the attic door behind her.
    “Yes, well,” Langston said to her mother, quite a few minutes after she was gone. “I’d take you a lot more seriously if you ever wore shoes.”
    *
    The bells rang a dozen times. Langston lay on her back, staring at the unfinished attic ceiling, the old wiring snaking along the lengths of board. Germane studied her some, then slept, then studied her more. At 12:15 she decided she could do with some lemonade, so she wandered down to the kitchen and drank some. The house was strangely still—the
town
seemed still.
    At 12:20 she thought she’d feel the weather, so she walked out onto the porch and down to the sidewalk. It was hot, as she’d suspected it would be. Germane followed the progress of a squirrel up a tree, but stayed close to her side. She could see the cars gathered tightly around the church, down on the corner of Chimney and Plum, and the hearse waiting with a grim patience at the bottom of the outside stairs.
A gay, ghastly holiday,
Emily once wrote. Langston headed in that direction, thinking she might wait