Free The Longings of Wayward Girls by Karen Brown Page A

would come in and chat with everyone,” she says.
    ray laughs and shifts the gears of the old truck with his left hand, removing it from the wheel to reach over so he doesn’t have to let go of her. “oh, yeah, fresh from the fields with his mud-splattered pants and chapped hands. The old new england farmer.”
    sadie looks at him carefully. His voice is harsh, as if she has opened up some old wound. she leans up and kisses his neck. each part of his body, she suspects, will be like a new territory.
    “Get your pumpkins, get your yellow squash, peppers, beans, get your fresh eggs,” he says in a barker’s voice. “now they’re all ready for spring—the bulbs, easter.”
    “will you stay?” sadie asks him.
she can’t imagine that the life he’s so far revealed to her— as a pampered prep school boy, or traveling to Aspen skiing,
to europe, or on the road with his band, playing gigs in dark
rock clubs—has even remotely prepared him to run a store,
much less a farm.
“It’s like some kind of joke,” ray says, looking pained.
even the truck is his father’s, one of the old faded green work
trucks he insisted on driving everywhere. ray tells her that
when he flew in from Florida his sister, beth, picked him up in it. “oh, she thinks it’s hysterical. ‘It’s your truck now,’ she
says.”
sadie shifts uneasily on the old vinyl seat, sits upright away
from ray and feels the springs beneath the upholstery. she
hasn’t yet considered beth as part of this. she remembers her
obsession with ray and almost asks him if his sister is still following him around, but decides against it.
    “How is beth?” she asks, trying to be kind.
ray laughs. “she teaches elementary school in Granby,” he
says. “If you can believe that.”
sadie finds this incredible, but she won’t say so. she imagines one of her children, one of her friend’s children even,
assigned beth as a teacher, and knows she would be uneasy
without really knowing why. she’s relieved beth teaches a few
towns away.
ray tells her his parents divorced years ago, that his mother
used to accuse his father of playing the “country bumpkin.” “He drank, too,” ray says. “There was that.”
After the divorce, his father moved into the old Filley
homestead, built by his own great-great-grandfather. He quit
drinking, went to AA, and was sober, as far as anyone knew,
until he died.
“I don’t come back here often,” ray says. “but when I have
the old place always seemed more like home than wappaquasset.” He says the name of the house he grew up in with a hint
of distaste, and sadie laughs. ray laughs, too, and she slips
back under his arm.
He drives down Duncaster road, the woods on either side
belonging to him, and then the fields where they grow the
corn, the wildflowers women buy now in paper cones for
fifteen dollars. He drives the truck over potholes, asphalt dislodged by tree roots. He pulls down a long, winding gravel drive lined with forsythia, to a rambling house made of trap rock. The house sits on a wide plot of open land, the woods encroaching in back. They sit in the truck and watch the wind knock the plaque by the front door ( Oliver Filley House, 1765 ),
watch it whip the forsythia’s bright shoots against the blue sky. when he gets out, sadie follows him. she asks him how
his father died, and ray tells her it was a heart attack. They
go into the house and sadie smells the old plaster, the paint
and sanded wood. she smells linseed oil. ray pauses in the
doorway to the kitchen and points to where ludlow found
his fathers when he didn’t come into the store for two days
in a row.
“Two days?” sadie says.
ray shrugs. “I guess no one checked in with him every day.
I know I didn’t monitor his life. I don’t feel guilty about that.” They stand in the doorway to the kitchen where his father
fell. ray tells her that the day beth picked him up at the airport
and brought him to the house the soup was still in the