Where Mercy Flows Read Online Free PDF Page A

was no sign of life in the house, no vehicles in the drive. It was a hauntingly lonely sight.
    I don’t know what I would have done if Mrs. Weatherbee had poked her head out the door and waved. Not that she would. If she
     recognized me sitting out there like a stalker staring at her house, she would be more likely to turn away and close the drapes.
     But then, she would have heard only Tim’s side of the story. I would have liked the chance to explain.
    I drove around Darlington for a while, past the Dairy Barn Drive-In and my alma mater, Darlington High. A cluster of students
     sprawled on the lawn with books open. They looked so young. Was I really that young when I left? I had felt so much older.
     I thought I was ready to run my own life. I thought I understood everything there was to know about life and death, but on
     both concepts I was wrong.
    My stubbornness had been my downfall more than once. It was one of the things I got from my father. But in our final contest
     my bulldog tenacity had won over his, or lost, depending on how you looked at it. I packed what I could carry in a duffel
     bag and my backpack and walked right past the Judge. He didn’t stop me. In fact, he opened the front door. My mother followed,
     trying to reason with me, but he reached out his hand and held her. Before I was all the way off the steps and onto the walk,
     the porch light went off. My father would no longer be a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. He made that clear. I
     could find my own way through the dark.
    It wasn’t until after TJ was born that I started admitting how much I missed them. Mom especially. I always wondered what
     she would do about this and that. How do you soothe a colicky baby? Is this diaper rash or the plague? I reached for the phone
     sometimes but always stopped myself. My life was way too complicated to explain. What if the Judge answered the phone? I was
     sure he was finished with me and I certainly had nothing to say to him. I did send short notes with selective information
     on occasion, but I feared that once I heard my mother’s voice, I might spill my carefully guarded secrets like dirty motor
     oil and never be able to clean up the mess.
    Coming home to the river had been TJ’s idea originally. All those nights as we cuddled in our big chair back in that dreary
     Reno apartment, I told him stories. Sometimes I made up bizarre creatures that lived in stumps or distant lands, but more
     often than not the characters were my sister, or our friend Donnie from down the road, and me in any one of our true adventures
     by the river. In TJ’s mind the river valley of my childhood was more magical than any elfin kingdom, more glorious than victorious
     knights on stately white horses. “Tell me about the bad boys that killed the big salmon, Mom,” he would say, and I would tell
     it as if he had never heard the tale before.
    I described the moods of the river, the sounds and the smells, the great blue heron poised like a statue in the shallows,
     waiting for fry. I told of the small creek that cut through the ravine beyond the barn. Every summer salmonberries hung faithfully
     over its banks—orange, yellow and red, like the bright jars of salmon eggs lined up on the shelves at Carter Store. Where
     the creek swept wide around a meadow of wild grasses with hitchhikers that stuck to my socks, blue forget-me-nots flocked
     at the water’s edge. Crawdads hid in the silt beneath the creek banks. Periwinkles in homemade shells clung to the rocks and
     sticks in the shallows until I pulled their hideous bodies out to use as fish bait, their spidery legs flailing in protest.
     TJ listened wide-eyed to the recounting of the dams Donnie and I built on the little creek and forts made with woven boughs
     and bracken ferns, where we hid undetected during pinecone wars.
    And then there was fishing. Fishing was the thing that intrigued TJ the most. Maybe because I could not speak of it without
     a