Together Alone Read Online Free PDF Page A

snapped.
    “Nice picture,” Emily said, but suddenly she wasn’t thinking of Doug. She was thinking that the time had come, the inevitable last few grains of sand through the hourglass. She was hearing freshman sounds in the hall, knowing that Jill should be out there, not in here with her. Oh God . “I should go,” she whispered, and the tears came then, helpless tears that flowed with love. “You be good.”
    Jill threw her arms around her neck and held on tight.
    “Be good,” Emily repeated in the same choked whisper, “and have fun, and study, and call me.”
    Jill was crying, too. Emily could feel the sobbing rhythm and hated it, hated it, but loved the warmth and the closeness.
    “Call me,” Emily repeated.
    “I will. I’ll miss you. I’ll worry.”
    Emily held her back, startled by that. “Worry? About me?”
    Jill nodded, but she didn’t elaborate, and Emily was on the verge of an all-out deluge, knowing that the longer she stayed, the worse it would be. So she stood quickly, gave Jill a last hug, and ran from the room.
    She was barely out the door when she turned right back. She shouldn’t have done it, because Jill hadn’t had time to move. She was sitting alone on the bed, her face teary, looking forlorn.
    “Oh God,” Emily whispered, then said, “I’m going straight to Grannick, but I may stop at the market before I go home. If you call and I’m not there, just leave a message, and I’ll call back. We may have to do that for a while, until you start classes and things settle down. I’ll be in tonight, but not tomorrow morning. I’m having breakfast with Kay and Celeste.” She caught her breath. “Oh God,” she whispered again. She ran to the bed and gave Jill a final last hug. “Want to walk me down?”
    “ Go , Mom.”
    • • •
    “It was awful ,” Emily cried at the Eatery, emotional even twenty hours after the fact. “I have no idea how I found my way back to the car, and then I could barely see the road, I was crying so hard. She looked so alone sitting there on that bed.”
    Celeste grinned. “And two minutes after you left, she was probably out in the hall having a grand time. Did you talk with her last night?”
    Emily searched her pockets for a tissue. “Uh-huh.”
    “And?”
    She blotted her eyes. “Uh-huh. A grand time. Great girls, hot guys, quote unquote. How about you? Have you heard from Dawn?”
    “Not a word, but that was the deal. She agreed to go to college in Grannick in exchange for my pretending she’s miles away. I can’t call her. She calls me. And she hasn’t.”
    “That should only be my problem,” Kay mused, catching the eye of the waitress and pointing at her coffee cup. “Three times the first day, twice yesterday. The books say that’s normal. What they don’t say is that it costs. I was forewarned about tuition, room-and-board, and textbooks, but none of them mentioned the phone bill. I’ll have to pay it before John sees it. He’ll hit the roof. He still thinks she should have gone to UMass.”
    “Hah,” Emily said. “John may make noise, but he can’t fool me.” She knew him well. She had been his friend before Kay’s, and both of those, before the girls were even born. “John is proud as punch that she’s in Washington. You wait. He’ll be looking forward to those calls.”
    “Three times a day?” Kay asked and looked impatiently around. “I need caffeine. You do know that if I didn’t love you guys so much, I’d never be here this early.”
    Emily knew about that love. Monday meetings with Kay and Celeste, sans spouses or offspring, were therapeutic. They had breakfasted through the summer and would switch back to dinners once Kay, who taught eighth-grade English, returned to work. “When does school start?”
    “Thursday. Ahhh. Here she comes.” She extended her coffee cup to the waitress with a grateful smile, then, declaring a pre-school splurge, ordered a hearty breakfast.
    Emily and Celeste ordered more