Free Carolina Moon by Jill McCorkle

sorry.”
    “But you were. Really.”
    Mack sits now with his hand covering Sarah’s hand. The sitter’s needlepoint is in the chair by the bed; Sarah’s parents had hired her to be there while he’s at work. They had known her for years. They wrote her check. They came and paid the sitter, just as they had done years before when Sarah was a child and they went out on Saturday nights.
    “Please let her come home with us,” Sarah’s mother kept saying, and there were times like now—June inviting him over for dinner—that he wishes he could.
    “Of course you can’t,” June says. “I’m so stupid.”
    “No, you’re not.”
    “I’ll bring dinner there, how about that?” she asks. “It’s just pasta and some kind of sauce you know. Easy stuff and a salad.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes. Absolutely.”
    “Thanks.” He hangs up the phone and comes back over to readjust the tape on the feeding tube entering her nostril, makes sure there are no kinks in the line. This is when he feels guilty. Times like this when what he really wants to do is step out into the night and into his car and go for a long drive. No planning, no scheduling. He gently rests his head on her chest and listens to the dull thud, wishing with all his might that something would happen, that someone or something would intervene.

Amazing how slow a satellite post office can get, even during the vacation season. Wallace Johnson suspects that it all has a lot to do with busy, busy lives and a lot to do with computers. About once a month, somebody will come bustling in, all wildeyed with a sack of papers, looking over that small room for a fax machine. He tells them that all they have is a copying machine, which used to be what everybody in a hurry needed, and overnight mail, which may or may not really make it overnight depending on when you sign off. It’s a very different speed people live in now, even when they’re on vacation. As far as Wallace is concerned, that’s their loss. He would just as soon read. The paper. The tide chart. The little descriptions of all the stamps issued: lighthouses, comedians, Elvis and Einstein. If you can name it, it’s probably on a stamp. And when he’s all alone, like now, he likes to read the letters.
    APRIL 1973
Dear Wayward One,
My whole life I have studied architecture. Not anything formal of course, just shapes and angles, windows facing east like the old-timeygraves. Let me see the sun rise on Judgment Day. Oh God, what if there IS a judgment day? It’s starting to worry me a little. You know now people don’t seem to give a damn how they’re buried—one on top of another, right side up. I guess I always liked the notion of those mausoleums, but that’s just because my whole life I have had a romance with little houses—playhouses, dollhouses, little dioramas like folks used to make out of a shoebox, a little wax paper window at a far end. I once made the Sahara Desert and my teacher said it wasn’t anything but a box of sand. She was not what I’d call a real imaginative sort. I like the notion of dark little houses, little windows and lifeless curtains. I see such houses and I think of all the folks who pass them by without a single notice, because of that exterior paint or maybe because it’s, say, over a business establishment or something. Imagine then that what you can’t see behind those tired dirty drapes is a love-filled life: maybe there’s a mama and a daddy curled up in their bed, and they are happy just because they have each other. And in the next room their children sleep and dream of ways to make those parents glad that they gave them life, glad that they have to work so hard to keep them all moving and growing and going. They have a plan and a purpose. I felt that I had a plan way back, when I sat under my house. I still do, though certainly my plans have changed numerous times over the years. You see, I thought we were like that couple in my dream. I thought we were