World and Town Read Online Free PDF

videotape they’re watching? Some kind of MTV? Asian guys with cars, anyway, Asian girls with long hair. A perpetual wind. Back out on the chilly porch, Hattie adjusts her focus wheel and makes out an abandoned girl, heartbreak, rain. Then a cell phone call; a change in the weather; and off the girl goes on the boy’s motorcycle, her arms around his waist. Just like in real life. They head into a neon sunset, leaving the city for something very like a prairie. Hattie is half expecting to behold, in the background, not a water buffalo, but a buffalo buffalo, when the dogs start to bark—Reveille and Annie with five-alarm excitement, but judicious old Cato more alarming than alarmed. He barks twice, gives Hattie a look through the screen door, then barks twice more. An incremental approach. Hattie nods a quick thanks. She has only just stashed the binoculars away under her seat cushion when Judy Tell-All appears.
    “You painting?” Judy Tell-All is a large woman with blunt bangs. “You never told me you painted.”
    Hattie shrugs and sniffs. Judy’s wearing a musky scent Lee would have called Eau de Pheromone .
    “Those bones?”
    “Bamboo,” says Hattie.
    “I thought you might be doing the lake.”
    “Well, I’m not.”
    “Because most people do do the lake,” observes Judy, batting her stiff lashes, “when they’re looking straight at it. That some kind of Chinese brush?”
    Hattie takes her time answering.
    “And how can you paint with both your glasses up? I can see your driving glasses, but don’t you need your readers?”
    Hattie sighs—trying to compensate for the lump under her pī-pī , though it’s like trying to walk with one high heel—an awkward business. Judy, dammit, is about to catch her out.
    But Judy, luckily, is too full up with news to catch anything. Because guess who’s in town—the middle son great professor! she blurts. Expelling the rest like something under pressure: Here for a spell and retired, it seems—as a body might expect a sixty-seven-year-old to be, if you didn’t know the Hatches. But, well, everyone does know the Hatches, never mind that they moved away some ten years ago now, right after the real Dr. Hatch died. And never mind that they sold off that great old Adirondack lodge of theirs in the process, either, with that fireplace that looked to have been practice for Fort Knox. (And to city folk, get that!—city folk who took down everything but the fireplace!) Still, seeing as how the Hatches go back to the Revolution—seeing as how they’re as much of a local feature as the town green, practically—people talk about them just the same. How the real Dr. Hatch died at a lab bench at ninety-nine, and how Carter’s older brother Anderson’s still going strong. Starting up a start-up, in fact, in his seventies. People talk and hear less about little Reedie, for some reason—always have. But Carter, now—Carter! No one but no one would have expected the middle son to up and retire.
    Yet such be the mystery and miracle of human change , as Lee would say. He’s hanging out for the first time in his life, apparently—and having a crisis as a result—but then, aren’t we all, says Judy with feeling. What’s more, he knows that Hattie is here—Judy having dropped in with a loaf of date nut bread and told him. Told him that Joe died a few years ago, too—lung cancer, never smoked, and so on. Gave him the whole scoop.
    “Though I didn’t have to,” she says. “You know why?”
    Hattie swishes a brush in some water.
    “Because he already knew,” she says. “He knew it all—everything! And do you know why he knew?”
    The Turners told him?
    “Because he was interested, that’s why. Because he was driven to know! Consciously or unconsciously.” Judy lifts her painted brows.
    Hattie blots her brush.
    “Not that he would ever say so. He’s like his father that way—a clam of a man. Keeps his cards close to his chest.”
    “Like any card-playing