Free Please Remember This by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

Sierra.
    “You could really do a lot to bring about change,” he said. “I know Phil’s talked to you about this. It will be a lot easier to get other people to open shopsif we can promise them that you’ll be there. You’ll bring in the traffic.”
    “What are you saying?” she asked. “You want
me
to open a store? Me? A store … that’s so capitalist.”
    How could anyone who had been running a successful business for twenty years complain about capitalism? “You’d meet a lot of interesting people, Sierra.”
    “But a store is such a commitment, Matthew, such a restriction of one’s freedom. Opening times, closing times. You know me, I’m a free spirit. I can’t be tied down.”
    Matt was suddenly angry. She was a free spirit? Maybe the dead were free to be spirits, but the living had obligations and responsibilities, things that did tie you down. “Ten years ago the School Board asked if you’d come in three times a week and teach an hour of French or German—nobody cared which—and you said you didn’t want to be tied down to a full-year contract. Since then, for a whole decade, every single kid at that high school has had to take Spanish because you didn’t want to be tied down, and I can’t see that you’ve gone anywhere.”
    “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, Matthew.” She was looking at him straight on. “And you’re making it sound like I didn’t have the right to say no. Am I morally obligated to come in and teach simply because the School Board refuses to fire that stupid Spanish teacher and hire someone who can teach more than one language?”
    That stupid Spanish teacher was a great basketball coach, and it was true there was no way that the School Board would ever fire him. Matt sighed. Henever stayed angry for long. “No, you weren’t obligated to, but it would have done a lot of good.”
    Why did she keep calling him Matthew? No one called him Matthew. He drained his tea, suddenly noticing a clear, clean taste rising up through the sweetness. “I can’t figure out what motivates you, Sierra. I know it’s not money; that much I do believe about you. But if you really mean what you say about growing and changing, you’ll do this. I’m not saying that you owe the town anything, but don’t you owe something to yourself? You used to make sense. You were wrong, but you made sense.”
    “Why are you bringing that up? Are you saying I owe you?’
    “I’m not saying anything like that, and anyway, it’s not me. It’s the town.” He was not going to let her personalize this, to make it a Matt-and-Sierra kind of thing. “We’d like you to open a retail establishment and do your best to make a go of it.”
    “It’s been almost twenty-five years. I’d be out of jail by now.”
    Matt shut his eyes. That had nothing to do with this.
    He hadn’t wanted to come out here. He knew that the conversation would end up like this. “You wouldn’t have gone to jail.”
    “You might not have been able to stop it.”
    “I’m the doctor. I sign the death certificates.”
    It had all been so long ago.
    Matt had grown up in Fleur-de-lis, but if things had gone according to plan, he wouldn’t have settled there. He wouldn’t have gone into a private medicalpractice. He had been full of ideals; he had wanted to change the world. During the final year of his residency, he had been talking both to the Peace Corps and to Doctors Without Walls, a French organization. His older brother, Phillip, would stay home and take care of the problems in Fleur-de-lis. Matt would save the rest of the world.
    And there were problems in Fleur-de-lis. It was the latter part of the 1970s, and family farmers, faced with rising energy costs and nearly punitive interest rates, were losing their land at a pace not seen since the Great Depression. Big agro-businesses, based across the river in Missouri, were buying up Kansas farmland.
    The Ravenal family had never been farmers. They had been doctors,