Free Autobiography of Us by Aria Beth Sloss

territory of date farmers and ranchers. I stayed mostly silent in the passenger seat beside Betsy, listening to Lindsey chatter on as she and Alex passed the flask back and forth in the backseat, both of them rolling down the windows to smoke. The landscape dulled as we drove, the trees giving way to great dry swaths of land that stretched out toward the horizon, pale as bone, dotted here and there with scraggly bushes whose branches scraped low to the ground as though bent to the task of finding water. Dust blew up around our wheels in clouds the sickly yellow of pollen—the car coated with it, we discovered when we stopped, thick enough you could write your name with a finger.
    We must have driven at least two hours before pulling into a long, winding driveway guarded on either side by date palms, their trunks dusted over so thickly with that yellow dirt the bark looked shaggy, like the coat of a wild dog. I’d been out to the property once before, years earlier when Robin and I were very young and our mothers had briefly become friendly. I’d forgotten how big the house was, though my mother had leapt to remind me of it the moment I told her about the wedding. Stunning, she’d called it. I never did find out when it had been built, but everything about it spoke to a kind of history missing from our house, its structure massive but oddly haphazard— rambling , maybe, is the better word.
    “What’s that funny thing?” Lindsey held a hand to her forehead, shielding her eyes as we walked up the path toward the house. She pointed to where a balcony jutted out on the third floor, the railing looped around and around with roses.
    “Widow’s walk,” I said automatically.
    “Gosh, how cheery,” Alex snorted.
    “You know the strangest things, Rebecca.” Betsy tugged at the hem of her dress. “I swear.”
    “They’re more common on the East Coast, I think. Robin told me her grandmother had it built after Mr. Pringle—Senior, obviously—died last year. She came from Boston, remember?” I looked up at the flowers strung along the white rail, the deep-pink blossoms falling open like mouths. “They were meant for sailors, in any case. Or, rather, the wives they left at home. They stood on the walk and watched the horizon, waiting.”
    “Not too morbid or anything,” Lindsey said.
    “They lived in this house together for twenty-five years.” I squinted into the sun. “Maybe she likes to stand out there and think of him coming back.”
    “Or maybe she gets up there with a shotgun in case he does,” Alex said, shading her eyes with her hand. “I bet she kicked up her heels once the old man was gone. I mean, I bet she runs around this place happy as a pig in—”
    “Look who beat us here,” Betsy interrupted, pointing across the lawn to where the boys were crowded around a table set with ice buckets and tumblers, a row of tall bottles standing guard over an enormous bowl of limes. Off to the side of that little circle stood Bertrand Lowell, wearing a pale-pink shirt and a woven hat, holding a glass of something iced.
    “Hello, hello.” Charlie Thornton was the first to call out. Most of the boys standing in that group waved. The shyer ones nodded in our direction or stared down at their shoes—freshly shined, the leather gleaming. They wore suits, navy and light gray and dark gray and black; a few had on jackets pin-striped with blue. They looked different than they did at school in their everyday clothes, and they stood as though they knew—their shoulders thrown back, spines ramrod straight. These were nice boys, all of them, the kind with whom any of our mothers would have been glad to see us paired off. There was Doc Rhiner, dark and bushy-browed, and tall Larry Templeton with his cowlick of blond hair; there was Charlie Thornton, the star of the track team; Oliver Hinden, who’d grown up next door to me and whose widowed father and little brother had on occasion spent Easter Sunday at our house,