Free Homesick Creek by Diane Hammond Page A

face it now, because it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to face later. The boy is bad for you, and he’s bad for Crystal.”
    “I don’t want to talk about that.”
    “You’re going to have to talk about it one of these days.”
    “I’m going to hang up,” Doreen said.
    “Did you want to talk to your daugh—”
    But Doreen had hung up. Anita smoothed the straining placket of her shirt. If Doreen thought she was going to beat the bushes to find someone with ten thousand dollars, she was wrong. Hack could probably come up with that kind of money, but why should he, even if Anita asked him—and she had no intention of asking him? Danny was bad news, and the sooner Doreen figured that out, the better. Anita wished someone had talked to her that frankly when she was Doreen’s age. Maybe they would have talked her out of Bob, and she’d be married to someone like Hack now instead, someone with money and smarts who gave her nice presents and was only a little unreliable.
    “Grammy, it’s dinnertime.” Crystal approached with a plastic pork chop sandwich on a plate and handed it to Anita.
    “Why, honey, that looks just wonderful,” Anita said, reaching out and accepting the fake meal that could almost, if you wished for it hard enough, be mistaken for real.

chapter four
    Rae Macy was a born pleaser, a woman who, at twenty-nine, still made a point of smiling at road crew flaggers and postal workers, who exchanged pleasantries with checkers in supermarkets and with fellow shoppers waiting in long department store lines. It was a small act of perfection: the slight, ironic smile, the gentle headshake of collusion that suggested,
at
least we’re in this together
. Born a good girl, she had become a nice young woman who remembered special occasions with greeting cards, who listened to other people’s stories with unfeigned interest, who was well liked by her superiors. She dressed tastefully, did her work capably, was still the straight-A student she had been not so long ago. She held a bachelor’s degree from UC Davis and an MBA from Stanford; she was a gifted amateur cellist and spoke fluent Italian. In San Francisco she had held increasingly responsible managerial jobs in US Bank’s marketing department, where she was told that her future looked bright.
    But here, in this foul little town overhanging the indifferent Pacific Ocean, here in this hell, she sold pickup trucks. A compulsive achiever, she now lived in a place where her accomplishments meant nothing. What was a poem in the
Seneca Review
when no one had ever heard of it? What was an essay, intricately crafted over weeks and sometimes months, when the best-selling periodical here was
Guns
? A year ago Rae would never have guessed that purgatory was a car lot, but now she knew it was so.
    Still, she and Sam had moved to Sawyer with their eyes open. Sam Macy had gone back to law school at thirty-two, only to graduate in a time of glut. His choices, they quickly found, were to be unemployed, abandon his new career, or accept work in a less competitive backwater where others were reluctant to go. Eventually the balance of supply and demand was bound to right itself, and as soon as it did, they could return from exile.
    And so Sawyer—three hours from a major airport, two and a half from a decent bookstore, two from a shopping mall, and as many from any institution of higher learning. They lived in a condominium on the beach—the pound of flesh Rae had exacted for coming to Sawyer—which turned out to house an ever-changing cast of tourists who assaulted the premises with vigor and noise.
    She and Sam had been married for six years, long enough for Rae to know not just the obvious things like how he coughed and the way he read a newspaper but the composition and location of each dental filling. Yet familiarity was not the same thing as intimacy; they had somehow devolved since their wedding from husband and wife to brother and sister. Was this