World and Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

clam.”
    “Exactly. Just like his father!” Judy bats her stiff lashes once more.
    And of course, Hattie knows she’s being baited. Can she just let people make of others what they will, though? Eyes on the far-off lake, she says, “He is not like his father.”
    “Is that so.” Judy’s eyebrows are painted kind of a fox red; they look like a bison’s brow from a Neolithic cave painting. “Well, I had an inkling you might want to know that he’s here, and I can see I was right.”
    You are not right , Hattie starts to say, but then—realizing that this is match point—already—she stops, puts her brush down, and laughs. How did she, Hattie Kong, come to be a woman worked over by Judy Tell-All?
    Judy frowns.
    “Is Hattie coming to the cell tower meeting?” she asks, after a moment.
    “Probably.”
    Save her a seat?
    Hattie shrugs—all right.
    As for whether she can guess who’s coming, though, Hattie just laughs again and declines to respond—to that, or to Judy’s And Ginny has news!—she and Everett have news! , either. Instead Hattie focuses, a few minutes later, on the happy sound of Judy leaving. Can gravel crunch happily? It does seem so to her.
    Judy nose full of beeswax .
    She liberates her binoculars. Then it’s down with her reading glasses and up with her jacket zipper—the metal a cold, hard press on her chin. A returning bittern flies on by; and there’s the one-note warble of the winter-hardy hermit thrush. If she sits long enough she could just hear a veery thrush and a wood thrush, too—kind of a trifecta. It’s happened before. And so Hattie listens as she paints, shutting her wandering thoughts out. Carter. Everett. Carter. Carter . Her stalks are rising fat but dry and light today—a bold shadowy vertical up the left side of her sheet. Not that she’s chosen that, exactly. It’s more bĭyì , the will of the brush. But there they go, in any case, with her hand’s blind help, one segment after another. They grow clear up through the top of the page.
    T own Hall was not made to hold so many. The lights of the suspended ceiling blink as if with surprise at the crowd, and up front, the cell tower people are blinking hard, too. They came during mud season on purpose, Hattie heard. Scheduled a meeting before the summerlings were back, so as to keep the turnout down. But look now how people keep coming—wave after wave of them, like something the lake’s washing up. Folding chairs are getting set up along the back and sides of the room, and there are extra chairs all along the front, too. Every last one of them squeaking as it’s opened until the metal chairs run short. Then it’s clatter you hear; those old wooden chairs do clatter. And there’s the family that stands to make out like bandits, right in the first row. The Wrights. A moat of empty chairs all around them, though cozied up with them does sit—can that be right?—Hattie’s walking group friend, Ginny. Who does not actually walk with the walking group—who actually only meets them later for coffee or lunch at the Come ’n’ Eat—but never mind. Hattie feels for her distance glasses even as Judy Tell-All waves her over. And sure enough: There indeed sits a certain pink turtleneck with bleached-blond do—that artichoke cut always reminding Hattie of how Ginny’s hairdresser does dog grooming, too. A versatile type. Maybe Ginny’s sitting up front on account of her hip? How uncomfortable the Wrights might feel, in any case, were it not for her. How marooned on their very own folding-chair island. Instead, Ginny leans in, saving them. They nod and joke and guffaw—Jim Wright proving himself a wit, it seems. A born funnyman.
    “When is a snake not a snake?” asks Judy as Hattie sits down.
    “When she has God on her side?” guesses Hattie.
    Judy smiles, but normally good-natured Greta, whom Judy has somehow managed to ensnare, too, is frowning. Her still-dark eyebrows all but meet over her straight, long