Homesick Creek by Diane Hammond

Author:Diane Hammond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307423627
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

chapter ten

Last night, half crazed with insomnia, Rae Macy had had a waking nightmare of herself in black canvas kung fu shoes, polyester pants, and a self-collared pastel sweatshirt with big-eyed kittens on the front. It could happen. Not now, of course, not yet, but if she and Sam stayed in Sawyer for another ten or fifteen years, as Sam had lately taken to suggesting, she would take no bets. Just yesterday she had had to restrain herself from running to the Safeway in her sweatpants and one of Sam’s old shirts. Why not? Everyone else here looked like hell. Still, let your standards slip, and the next thing you knew, you were shopping the sales rack at Sears.

At the bottom, though, her bravado was a brittle thing. She was lonely; she didn’t know when she’d ever felt so lonely. Was there another person within fifty miles who cherished Chekhov the way she did? Sam didn’t. God knows Hack Neary didn’t. Rae wasn’t even absolutely sure he could read.

Yet Hack Neary was the single thing she looked forward to each day with his secrets and sad eyes, his compulsive cheap seductions. Behind it hunkered some old tragedy or transgression. Could he have been an assassin in Vietnam? He refused to talk about the war except to say it had not always been the living hell you saw in movies, that not all his memories were dark. Rae had asked him if Bob had served there too, Bob lately having taken on the gutted look of a man who had seen more than he could live with. But Hack had laughed at that and said Bob was a charmed man; God had given him the flattest feet his draft board doctor had ever seen. Hack himself had had arches worthy of a ballerina.

Bob sometimes ate lunch with Rae and Hack in the showroom, unpacking two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a Hawaiian Punch juice box, and a Twinkie from a brown paper bag. It was the lunch of a schoolboy, no doubt a larger version of the one Crystal took to Head Start. Rae remembered the little girl in her pink plastic coat very well. Bob had brought her to the dealership several times since then, and she had played gravely until Bob or her mother got off work and could take her home. She rarely smiled outright, but Rae suspected it was the expression of a cautious nature rather than shame over her steel teeth. Plus she might not have had all that many reasons to smile. The mother was a laundress, and the father was a felon. Rae listened to Bob talk about Crystal and Doreen with appalled fascination.

“Hey, beautiful,” Hack said from the doorway of her cubicle. She jumped.

“Hey,” she said, flushing to her scalp.

“How about taking me to the Bobcat for coffee?”

“Now?”

“You too busy?”

He knew she wasn’t too busy. She hadn’t been busy since she’d started working here.

She stood, nearly as tall in her heels as he was, and swung her purse up over her shoulder.

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