Free News of the Spirit by Lee Smith

would holler, kicking sand, which stuck to our baby-oiled arms and legs and made us look like sandpaper girls. Then he’d run off down the beach laughing his big fake laugh, “Har-dee-har-har,” at the top of his lungs. Jinx and I hated him. We went spying on his cottage one night and were appalled to witness Buddy’s fat father, sitting alone on the porch, bury his face in his hands and sob as if his heart would break. This violated every known rule of conduct. Men were not supposed to cry, especially notfathers. “Yuck,” Jinx mouthed at me, her round white face like a horrified little moon in the shadows. I felt my own heart drop to my feet in a long, sickening fall. The next day, we were a lot nicer to Buddy on the beach.
    Our mothers played bridge and went on a gin-and-tonic diet, which meant that they walked up and down the beach a lot with insulated plastic tumblers in their hands. Jinx and I won cheap jewelry by throwing softballs at stuffed cats in the amusement park, rode rented bikes, and drank some gin of our own with three girls from Durham, North Carolina, who had stolen it from their parents. We bleached our hair with lemon juice. We got real tan, and did not burn our eyelids. The weather was perfect every day except for the last one, which dawned rainy, and so we packed up and drove home early to surprise our daddies.
    They would be at work, of course, when we got there. Mama dropped Jinx and her mother off first, then let me out at home and went on to the grocery store. I let myself in with the key and took my bag upstairs to my room, which looked
smaller
now, a baby’s room. I put my bag on the bed and turned to the mirror and then stopped still, in shock—I almost failed to recognize myself! My bleached blond hair, grown out longer than it had ever been, curled all around my dark face, which looked different, too…thinner, not so babyish.
    I raced outside and got my bike out of the garage and rode off to see Carroll Byrd. It was a drizzly, humid Augustday; I was covered by a fine mist of rain, like my own sweat, by the time I turned down her lane. I rode until I reached the hedge where I always hid my bike, then slipped behind the farthest boxwood, looking toward the house.
    But I went no closer.
    For there, parked right in front, was Daddy’s car, the familiar big gray Oldsmobile with the AAA and Rotary Club stickers. Even from where I was, I could see his old canvas hat stuck under the back windshield.
    I waited and waited. At first I thought,
Oh well, Daddy’s her lawyer. This is a lawyer visit
. Then I stopped thinking anything, as gradually it came over me. I didn’t move a muscle. I stayed behind that boxwood for one hour and forty minutes by my watch, and then dodged back to the hedge and got my bike and rode home. When I went to bed that night, after Mama’s special supper and Daddy’s big hello, my arms and legs ached and ached, as if I had run a race, or climbed a mountain.
    I NEVER RODE MY BIKE TO C ARROLL B YRD’S HOUSE again. But the horrible thing was that I didn’t really blame Daddy. I could see why he would love her. For in a sense, Daddy was
like
her: a loner, an observer, an outsider…despite the fact that he’d been born and brought up in Lewisville, despite the fact that he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing and had been at it for decades.
    Daddy had run the mill, Dale Industries, since he was only twenty-eight years old, when his own father killed himself.
    One day I asked Daddy to tell me about this. We were down at the mill, in the very office where my grandfather had done it. It was after hours, and Daddy was trying to finish up some paperwork, at the same desk where his father had kept the gun in the bottom drawer. “Why?” I kept asking. “Why did Granddaddy shoot himself?”
    But all Daddy would say was, “Oh, Jenny, honey, there are pressures, circumstances, that you can’t possibly understand at your age”—the kind of response that