Free The Rail by Howard Owen Page B

why few of his mother’s old stories seemed to involve him.
    â€œI was working,” he told her, “or playing ball.” He didn’t admit that he sometimes wondered, too. Sometimes, growing up, he feared that his mother wanted to forget James Penn and everything reminiscent of him almost as much as William Beauchamp did.
    Tom shows Neil and David around the hardware store, now expanded as much as it can at its present location, spilling its fall flowers and wooden lawn furniture, its bird feeders and whiskey-barrel planters, onto the sidewalk and out the sides. He’s been out of the grocery business for many years, and the immigrants from the city are providing him with a good living. This Tuesday, several women in their 30s and 40s are wandering the aisles, shopping for curtain rods, fertilizer and garden hoses. A few of the husbands are there as well.
    â€œThey come in here to buy a toggle bolt and wind up with ninety dollars of tools,” Tom tells Neil and David out of the corner of his mouth. “Where the hell do people get all this money from?”
    He leaves the store in the hands of his assistant manager, and the three of them walk over to the Station for lunch. Inside, there are murals of old locomotives on the walls. A bar area in the middle of the large room has been made over to roughly resemble a Pullman car, with stools alongside.
    Tom seems to know everyone, new and old. A couple of men in their 60s, both classmates of Neil whom he can barely remember, stop to say hello. They try to talk a little baseball, but they obviously know more about this year’s World Series and next year’s chances than Neil does. He worries that they will think he’s standoffish, but he’s never been crazy about talking baseball.
    He hears his name spoken, and out of the corner of his eye he sees a table of younger men, in dress shirts and ties, sharing a table perhaps 20 feet away, looking toward him. They look down as he turns to face them, and two of them laugh at something the other must have said.
    Neil is used to this. There weren’t many celebrities at Mundy.

SEVEN
    Neil says they have a grocery list, that they have to go and check on David’s car. Tom promises they’ll be back at the store by 3 o’clock at the latest.
    So they squeeze into the cab of Tom’s truck, faded to near-pink and dwarfed by the newer one.
    They turn left on Castle Road, away from Blanchard’s, then left again on a street that was only a pair of ruts through the hardwoods the last time Neil saw it. They loop gradually to the right and soon are in sight of two long lines of brick homes, Georgian and Colonial mostly, flanking the road.
    The leaves are nearly gone, so that Lake Pride is visible across three-quarter-acre lots, sending the low-riding sunlight to them on one hop. Cul-de-sacs peel off through the forest, most of them still works in progress, with finished houses next to bare footings. Some of the streets are not paved yet. The asphalt is cracked already and streaked red from the big trucks that rumble past, bringing lumber, taking away felled trees.
    They go halfway around the lake and then Tom takes a left and they are on a road that circles Lake Pride Estates’ other main selling point: the golf course. Twice the road crosses the cart path. Through the backyards, they can see occasional gumdrop bursts of brightly-colored sweaters as retirees ride alongside the emerald grass, casting long shadows as they get in one more Indian-summer round.
    â€œIsn’t this something?” Tom asks. “There’s five hundred houses already built, and they say they plan to build a couple of thousand more. ’Course, the ones on the golf course got gobbled up fast.”
    â€œSo I guess we can’t go fishing?” David says, showing the twisted smile again.
    â€œNah. Not here anyways. I’d like to see somebody go traipsing through one of these folks’ yards