Free Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey

Christie?”
    â€œWell—not much, actually.”
    â€œDoes somebody get murdered?”
    â€œYes, somebody gets murdered.”
    â€œAnd there’s a smart detective? I read an Agatha Christie once for a book report, and there was a really smart detective named Hercule Poirot.”
    His French accent was impeccable and unselfconscious. Dorrie frowned at him. “Would you like to read this when I’m done, Hugo? It’s a lot better than Agatha Christie. It’s quite funny, in fact, and the characters are human and real; it’s not just a puzzle.…”
    Hugo was shaking his head, standing with his hands in his pockets looking at her and smiling politely. “Oh, no, thanks. You could tell me the plot when you’re done; I’d like to hear what it was about.”
    â€œBut Hugo—”
    They were sitting out on the deck, where the breeze was almost cool. The light was fading. Soon she would have to go inside, but the house was stuffy and she resisted, even though her book turned gray in her lap and the sun was setting rose and purple over the Garners’ roof. Hugo had been exploring the neighborhood; he’d strolled down Little Falls Road as far as the Verranos’ and had penetrated the woods—not very far—on the other side of the road. He’d reported to Dorrie a black snake in the woods and what sounded like guitar music coming from the Verrano place.
    â€œA harmless garter snake,” she told him. “And it must have been the radio. I don’t think either of the Verranos plays guitar.”
    â€œDo they have any kids?”
    â€œNo—they’re a young couple, not married very long. He works for the phone company and she’s a nurse, I think.” She hated to think of the Verranos. They often walked down the road in the evenings, hand in hand; once they had stopped to kiss right in front of her house; and one evening, walking along the pond picking wildflowers, she had come to the waterfall that marked the property boundary and seen them standing in it as if it were a shower, embracing, the water glancing like diamonds off their naked bodies. Dorrie had dropped her jewelweed and lilies and hurried back home, mortified and near to tears. They hadn’t seen her; it was her envy of them, her painful longing, that mortified her. She always thought she was safe, cured, resigned, until someone else’s happiness cast its radiance on her meager contentment and bleached it out to nothing.
    â€œBut Hugo—” He stood before her, his round stomach straining against his T-shirt and his face cheerful. “Hugo, if you don’t read, what do you do? I mean—” She could see he found the question absurd—and it was, in a way. Plenty of people didn’t read. What did Phineas use to do while his sister sat in her room with her nose in a book? Get in trouble. “When you lived with Grandpa, how did you spend your evenings?”
    â€œOh—” He shrugged, paused, smiled again to himself as if recalling good times. “I guess I did my homework. And we played Scrabble or Monopoly or crazy eights or something, or we watched a little television. And then we talked quite a lot.”
    It was still unimaginable: her ponderously cultured, quiet, bookish father and this restless boy. “What did you talk about?”
    â€œOh—this and that.”
    â€œWell.” It really was too dark to read outdoors, she could hardly see her book, but Hugo’s face loomed pink above her, vivid in the sunset glow. He looked disappointed, his smile gone. He had expected something from her—the magical breaking, with a word, of the spell of his sad boredom. She closed her book. What she wanted, desperately, was to get into her coolest nightgown, pour a cold glass of wine, settle into the comfortable chair by the window fan, and open her book again. The longing to read was sometimes almost a physical