Free Talk of the Town by Mary Kay McComas Page A

Being an unwed mother would explain it, too, but . . . “You were young."
    "Not so very. I was nineteen," she said, and then because talking to him was as easy as slipping on ice, she added, "I'd run away from home twice by then."
    Gary was starting to feel punchy. He hadn't dreamed he'd be opening such a huge can of worms. She was by far a much stronger woman than he'd imagined. Her life made his seem like a picnic—and it pretty much had been, he thought. If the worst things that ever happened to him as a kid were being called garbage boy because his dad rode on the back of a sanitation truck and having to endure endless jokes about the origins of everything he'd ever owned, then his childhood had been a picnic.
    "Why?" he asked, feeling nosy and half afraid she'd be offended and not answer, but asking anyway.
    "Why what?"
    "Why'd you run away from home?"
    "Well, Redgrave looks a lot better to me now than it did in those days. Back then I thought it was hell on earth. Everyone knew everyone else's business. My mother was gone. My dad was a drunk. And Earl ... Earl said I could do anything I wanted to do, if I wanted to do it bad enough. So I left."
    "Just like that?"
    She nodded and smiled at her foolishness. "I was fifteen the first time. I hitched to San Francisco. It only took a week to spend all the money I'd saved while I was looking for a job. But who was going to give a scrawny little kid a job? The second time, I was seventeen and a half and calling myself eighteen. I worked truck stops and bars where it was legal, from here to Chicago."
    "Why'd you come back?"
    "I was homesick . . . and pregnant with Harley. Earl sent me bus fare. He always has money stashed around somewhere."
    "Was your dad alive then? When you came home?"
    "Oh, yeah. Between the two of us, Redgrove was a regular soap opera for a while."
    "He was mad? About Harley? And you’re running away?"
    "No, not really," she said passively. "He just made sure that I knew that Earl's disability check couldn't handle another mouth, much less two more, and he went on drinking. That's when I went to work at the fence factory."
    Gary stared at her for a long moment, then glanced away, shaking his head. “You sound so impervious to it all."
    "Do I?" she asked, searching inward. "Maybe I am now, to parts of it. It's been a long time, and things have changed. And it was a long time before I noticed that not everyone was growing up the way I was. I didn't know it was supposed to be different." She smiled. "What about you? You grew up wanting to be a garbageman. That must have been a surprise to your teachers."
    As it happened, nothing Gary did ever surprised his teachers. His older brother had paved a path for him at school—so his dreams of becoming a trashman weren't unheard of—and it wasn't long before his teachers and friends received their first few injections of his shocking personality, which soon came to be expected rather than startling.
    He was a surprise to Rose, however. Constantly. The next few minutes included.
    He was almost timid in telling her about growing up between his two brothers with a mother who made sure he washed behind his ears and ate his lima beans, and a father who spent years coaching junior league football after work. And he could hardly look her in the eye when he disclosed that his mother had taken a job and his father had worked an extra four nights a week as a janitor to get them through college.
    "They just had their forty-fifth wedding anniversary a few months ago," he said, finishing off the last of the wine in his glass. "We got together and gave them cruise tickets. That's where they are now, somewhere in the Caribbean, buying souvenirs for Christmas presents."
    "And having a wonderful time," she said, warming to the affection in his voice when he spoke of his family. She didn't think it was fair to envy him his parents, but she couldn't help hoping that maybe someday Harley's eyes and voice would be soft and gentle when