Free A Dream to Cling To by Sally Goldenbaum

dinnertime. Everyone is home eating. In an hour or so there’ll be movement again. It’s Thursday night.”
    “Poker at the VFW. I see.” She laughed.
    He pointed out a large building with a flag hanging from an angled rod and a huge porch stretching across its front. “That’s it, the VFW building, and the building next to it is the post office where my father worked for thirty-five years. And over here”—he took off across the street, pulling Brittany along with him—“is the store that gainfully employed me for … oh, forever, it seemed.”
    They were standing in front of a grocery store with a painted sign that read WASSINK’S GROCERIES in faded red letters.
    Brittany peered through the dusty windows at wooden counters and tall shelves crammed full of packages and cans, and tried to imagine the man beside her as a young boy spending hours in this store. She couldn’t. “Sam the Renaissance man, in an apron, slicing up bologna … I think I need time to adjust to all this.”
    He laughed and pulled her close, his hand moving up to rest on her shoulder.
    “I delivered groceries sometimes, and clerked and soothed hurt feelings when Gus Wassink scolded girls for buying lipstick and boys for hanging around and reading his magazines and housewives for talking too softly.”
    “He was something of a character?”
    “You might say so, but not a bad sort of fellow if you looked deep enough.”
    She studied Sam’s face as he talked and listened for words that weren’t spoken. His eyes were bright with memory, but they didn’t tell her what she wanted to know: Had he had fun here? Had he joked and laughed and entertained, like he did with the folks at the Elms? Had he charmed the girls and had they hung around to flirt with him?
    But he caught her hand again, wove his fingers through hers, and moved on. “The church is around the corner, and there’s a local hospital that all the people here use, St. Francis Xavier. Both my brother and I were born there.”
    “Your brother?”
    He nodded. “Baby brother Joseph. Joe Lawrence. He’s a nice person and about as different from me as any mortal could be, which, I guess, is a blessing. He was perfectly content here and left only because he wanted to go to a teacher’s college and Shadyside didn’t have one.”
    “Did he come back?”
    “No, but almost. He married a fellow teacher from a tiny little town in northern Pennsylvania and they live a replica of Shadyside life there.”
    “Were you and Joe buddies growing up?” She was listening intently to his answers, trying to sort through these new views of Sam, trying to see how they fit together. It was all a surprise to her, and she couldn’t say why, but Shadyside and Sam seemed an uncomfortable match.
    “Not buddies,” he answered, “Not exactly.” He onceagain led her across the street and headed for a sign with HUGE HAMBURGERS outlined in neon lights. “Joe was several years younger and I was kind of responsible for him. That made being a buddy hard. Mom worked at a department store and I was the one around most. When I was working, I took Joey with me.”
    “He was pretty dependent on you, I guess.”
    “Yep. Which is why I stayed around here as long as I did.” He glanced at Brittany. She was listening so carefully, but was she hearing what he was saying?
    Her eyes grew larger and she squeezed his hand. “It must have been difficult as a teen, being responsible for someone else like that.”
    “Oh, you do what you do. And I would never have shirked it, not for a minute. I loved Joey. But having someone that dependent on me kept me here, and also taught me some important things about myself.
    “God made certain people certain ways, and He must have given me an extra set of wings, because no matter what happened, I never felt comfortable here. It was claustrophobic. I was always looking for the rainbow, wanting to taste the rest of the world, to move on, to learn new things. I never