Free The Realm of Last Chances by Steve Yarbrough

her friend. Unlike most people, whose expressions were constantly changing, whether happy or sad, puzzled or mad, Patty’s expression remained fixed, as if she’d been captured by a photographer in a moment of bored composure—at church, say, or the funeral of a distant relative.
    “What’s so weird about her idea of a treat?” Kristin asked.
    The other girl flicked on a light. The shelves were stocked as neatly as those at Food Giant, and they were almost as full. Most of what she saw was pretty basic: cans of Le Sueur green peas, boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
    But then Patty reached up and pulled down a round tin like the ones fruit cakes came in at Christmas. “Ever eaten hoop-cheese wafers?” she asked.
    “I don’t think so.”
    Patty pulled the top off, and the tin was filled with crumbly orange things that emitted a pungent smell. “My mother makes stuff like this,” she said. “Want to try one?”
    “What’s in them?”
    “Margarine, flour, red pepper, Rice Krispies and hoop cheese.”
    “What’s hoop cheese?”
    “Something they sell in country stores down south.”
    “That’s where your mother’s from?”
    The other girl nodded. “Prices Fork, Virginia.” She started to replace the lid.
    “Wait,” Kristin said, because she sensed that she’d behaved exactly as Patty expected, showing revulsion at something unfamiliar; if that was what she expected, it must have happened before. “Let me try one.” As though it were a slimy creature she’d found beneath a rock, she seized a wafer between thumb andforefinger and, despite the awful odor, popped it into her mouth, where it instantly dissolved. A moment or two passed before she realized how wonderful it tasted. “I like it,” she said.
    “Are you joking?”
    “No. Really.” She took another one.
    “Well,” Patty said, choosing a couple for herself, “I actually like them, too.”
    They carried the tin upstairs to Patty’s room and finished off the wafers while watching
Bewitched
. During the show they reached agreement on a number of crucial points: though her character was obnoxious, Agnes Moorehead had attractive features; Dick Sargent was a better Darrin than Dick York; and Esmeralda was a poor substitute for Aunt Clara. By the time Kristin’s parents got ready to go home, she’d made arrangements to spend the night.
    Over that long summer they became closer and closer, roving South Market Street after pooling change to buy candy and sodas, wading in the shallows of Penns Creek, tossing a Frisbee on the banks of the Susquehanna so George, the Connultys’ clumsy Airedale, could chase it down and bring it back rimed with slobber. Three or four times a week, they took turns sleeping over at each other’s house, where they fell asleep side by side after midnight, often with library books open on their chests. Both of them, it turned out, loved to read. In Kristin’s case, that made sense because her parents taught English and her mother had named her after the heroine of her favorite novel,
Kristin Lavransdatter
. Mr. Connulty, on the other hand, had an engineering degree, and you never saw his wife open a book.
    The Connultys had met at Virginia Tech. Or, to be more accurate, in the waiting room at the Montgomery Regional Hospital, where he was waiting for them to revive a fraternity brother whose pulse had all but disappeared after he emptied a fifth of Four Roses. Patty’s mother, who was only nineteenthen and worked at something called the Dixie Sweet Shop, was waiting for them to release her father, who’d lost a finger in a pulp-mill accident. “She took one look at me,” Kristin had heard Mr. Connulty say, “and thought she knew all there was to know. I was a drunken frat boy, pure and simple. Probably from Northern Virginia, with parents who had plenty of money but not enough vision to send him to William and Mary, Washington and Lee or even UVA.” That his background was different from what she’d imagined