Free The Quiet Streets of Winslow by Judy Troy

attractive to her. “Plus I thought it would make him like me more,” she said. Although by the time she knew she was pregnant he was dating somebody else. “So we weren’t together too long,” she said, “and there are things I don’t remember, due to what I was into, back then.”
    In grade school she thought she would be famous one day. She would invent something or cure a disease, be a singer or an actress. She wasn’t sure when her I’ll-be-famous feeling went away, only that when she stopped having it she kept waiting for what would come in its place, and nothing did. She hardly noticed me as she spoke. She was looking beyond me into the past at what she had lost and what she had ruined for herself.
    I knew what it was like to make a mistake and not be able to fix it, how it replayed in your head, made you want to reverse time and undo it. I hit a cat in the road once and kept on going. As a kid I pushed a boy off the top of the monkey bars, called an Hispanic kid a greaser, chased a girl off the swings. You do things. You screw up. You are a mystery to yourself. That was what Freud believed, so far as I understood him, and that was a preoccupation in the Bible—all those people who let God down. I mean, there were multitudes.
    Ernest Sterling used to have this quotation taped to his dashboard: Our human life is ten thousand beautiful mistakes . He couldn’t remember where he had come across it, but there it was in front of him every day, and it would come into his thoughts at other times, he said, like when his dog was peeing on somebody’s flower bed, or when his toast popped up burned, or when he waited too long to pay his water bill. Then suddenly there it was, he said, those beautiful mistakes that make up a life. “Do you get what I mean, Nate?” he said. And I said no, and he said, “Me neither,” and right then, he said, right at that moment of not knowing shit about anything, we were in the midst of it.
    A FTER J ODY RECOVERED from the flu I had a dream about her. She was sitting on Mike Early’s lap, naked, whereas he was clothed. The odd thing was that this was before I knew about the picture, before I knew anything was going on between them. I thought the dream was about how vulnerable Jody was, about how vulnerable maybe everybody was under the surface, no matter what they told you or what their actions were. There was an outside self and an inside, a public and a private, a self they sought to control and a vulnerable self they couldn’t. And they tried however they could to make peace between the two.
    I was trying to be happier, Hannah, and I went about it wrong. But I was still a good person. I was still trying to be a mother to you .
    But all the regrets in the world never saved anybody. I learned that myself. It didn’t matter how sorry you were.

chapter fourteen

    TRAVIS ASPENALL
    H ARMONY C ECIL SAT with her friends at lunch, and I sat with mine. There were no rules about it, but nobody moved around much, not from the first or second grade on, even though you could have. Nobody would have stopped you. It was like once you started school you didn’t know what freedom was anymore, and that was partly on my mind when I said to Harmony, in the cafeteria, “You could sit with me, you know,” and she surprised me by doing it. She sat with me, Billy, and Jason at lunch, instead of with her friends. Her friends sat two tables over, and I noticed her looking toward them as if she were nervous. I wondered if the fact that I had had girlfriends before was something they held against me, or if the fact that I liked Harmony was something they held against her.
    Girls were competitive with each other, Nate had told me; you had to watch out for all that jealousy that went on between them. I didn’t know then that Nate had never had a real girlfriend, that he was just giving what my father would have called “advice