Free Things I Want to Say by Cyndi Myers Page A

figuring out which of my sins needed forgiving—and which wounds I needed to heal—made me a little queasy.

5
    When Frannie and I first moved to Hollywood, we rented a tiny Airstream trailer in a mobile-home park within sight of the famous Hollywood sign. Frannie went to beauty school during the day and worked nights as a switchboard operator at MGM.
    I went to school, came home and baked brownies and lay across my bed, making halfhearted attempts to do my homework. Mostly what I did was daydream.
    In my fantasies, I took glamorous trips around the world, often in the company of handsome men or with groups of friends—both things were noticeably absent from my life in those days.
    Frannie was never part of those dream trips. How ironic that I waited another twenty-two years to actually go anywhere without her.
    True, I wasn’t in Morocco or Luxembourg, and there were no rich, dashing men in sight, but Alice and Amish country offered the same escape I’d craved all those years ago. I figured I was starting small. This year, Pennsylvania. Next year, Paris!
    After breakfast the following morning Alice decided she wanted to try to find the place where she’d spent her honeymoon. “I think I remember the road it was on,” she said. “I want to see if the house is still there.”
    We set out down a winding two-lane county road, slowing behind the occasional black Amish buggy. The scenery was straight out of a picture book—neat white farmhouses set back from rolling fields, draft horses grazing in pastures, laundry flapping on clotheslines in backyards.
    “Briar Rose Lane.” Alice read the wooden sign nailed to a fence corner. “I think this is it.” She slowed and turned the big truck onto an even narrower road. We crept along while she studied the various houses we passed. “This is the one,” she declared at last, stopping in front of a sprawling white house. “I remember the fence in front and that big oak tree with the swing.”
    “It looks like a private home,” I said. As I spoke, a woman in a blue dress and white cap came out onto the porch and looked toward us.
    “I think it is, now,” Alice said. “It was then, too, but there was a little sign on a post out here that said they had rooms for overnight guests.”
    I looked at the woman on the porch again. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “If we keep sitting here, she’s liable to call the cops. She might think we’re casing the place.”
    “I’d kind of like to look inside.” Alice glanced at me and shrugged. “Guess I’m feeling nostalgic.”
    I thought of my drive out to my childhood home in Ridgeway and wondered if Alice felt the same kind of pull. Except I’d had no desire to enter the house on Amaranth Avenue.
    Instead of calling the police, the woman sent one of her children out to talk to us. The boy looked to be about nine. He was barefoot, dressed in too-short black pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His thick blond hair fell over his forehead and he stood on tiptoe to look into the cab of the truck. “Do you ladies need some help?” he asked.
    “Hi.” Alice smiled at him. “My name is Alice and this ismy friend Ellen. When I was younger, I stayed in this house on my honeymoon. I was in the neighborhood and wanted to see the place again.”
    The boy glanced back toward the house, his lower lip jutting out as he processed this information. Then he looked back at us. “Do you want to come in?” he asked.
    “We’d love that. Thank you.” Alice was out of the truck and standing beside the boy before I’d even unfastened my seat belt. I followed her and the boy up the long drive to the porch where the woman waited.
    “These ladies want to see the house,” the boy said.
    The woman folded her hands across her stomach and studied us with a worried expression. “The house is not for sale,” she said.
    “Oh, I don’t want to buy it.” Alice offered up another of her hundred-watt smiles.