Walk (Gentry Boys) Read Online Free PDF Page A

had once been described as ‘elfin’, sometimes I had to try a little harder than other women to look like someone to be reckoned with. 
    “Keep moving,” I said to the mirror. 
    It was part of a longer motivational quote that my boss had had hanging on a lithograph in her office.  She’d probably be amused to learn that I often repeated it to myself but it would be too embarrassing to admit. 
    Besides me the only other breathing creature in my apartment was Teddy, my Himalayan Guinea Pig.  When I’d first started bringing home a fat enough paycheck that allowed me to live alone in nicer digs than the cheap places surrounding the university, it had seemed like a life victory.  There were no roommates leaving dirty dishes or using up all the toilet paper or installing deadbeat boyfriends on the living room couch.  Just me.  And Teddy, if you could count him as company. 
    But lately I’d just been feeling lonely.  Many of my college friends had settled into long-term relationships and a few were planning weddings.  Meanwhile, I’d never found a way to make love exceed the six month mark and my last semi-boyfriend had actually called me a ‘cock killer’.  That was just his charming way of deflecting his own personal sexual inadequacies.  At least that’s what Briana, who was interning with a clinical psychologist, had insisted when I hiccupped through the humiliating story.   She might have just said that because she was trying to make me feel better. It did.   
    “Wish your mama a happy birthday,” I ordered Teddy, picking him up and nuzzling him briefly before gently returning him to his enclosure.  Once I set him down he blinked his beady little guinea pig eyes at me and then attacked a piece of iceberg lettuce. 
    The sky was a brilliant blue and it was impossible not to feel slightly cheerful as I climbed into my old cherry red Ford pickup truck.  It was a gas guzzler, a wallet emptier, an environmental eyesore.  It was my most favorite thing in the world.  
    It would take about an hour to drive down to the prison.  I’d called yesterday and talked to a bored, gum-chewing admin who confirmed that visiting hours for Macon’s unit were still on schedule.  Of course that didn’t mean he’d agree to see me.  He never had before.
    My mother had already tried to call me twice so once I was on the road I called her back. 
    “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” she said with the warm sincerity that only a mother could summon.
    I smiled.  “Hi, Mom.”
    In the terrible year following my father’s death and Macon’s imprisonment she’d sold the house in Flagstaff and accepted a position teaching literature at a small college about a hundred miles south of Salt Lake City.  Even though I’d felt sore over the loss over my childhood home at a time when it seemed I was losing everything, I understood her reasons.  Home had become a poisonous place of bad memories and reminders of what was gone.  She was better off in a place that had no backstory. 
    We chatted for a little while as I steered toward the southeast.  She asked when I would be visiting again and I promised to make it there for Thanksgiving if not sooner. It was all very pleasant and very mundane and very Macon-free. 
    As usual the problem wasn’t what we said to each other.  It was the weight of what was unsaid that hung thick over the five hundred miles separating us.  The main thing we weren’t talking about was the fact that on this day twenty-five years ago, I wasn’t the only child born to Marion and Richard Dupont. 
    I didn’t tell her I was driving down to visit him.  She would have sniffled and sighed and perhaps started to cry.  Macon’s descent had been so long and so painful, even before that final, fatal confrontation.  At least now there was some relief in knowing that he had at least six months left behind bars. Six more months that would keep him off the streets and away from the venom that