The Distinguished Guest by Sue Miller

Author:Sue Miller [Miller, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408857649
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter 11

Linnett drove slowly home, preoccupied. As a result, she missed her driveway and was in the village before she realized it. She went all the way down to the docks and made her turn in the lot there. Even now there were a couple of pickup trucks parked against the concrete abutment, the men in them drinking beer and shouting their conversation from vehicle to vehicle under the single, glaring light high overhead. Linnett drove even more slowly back up the dark road. There was one couple walking on the sidewalk in the village, startled and squinting in her headlights. Otherwise the occasional lighted house was the only sign of life.

She spotted her driveway this time—Thayer on the mailbox—and turned into the woods. In a hundred yards or so, the drive opened out to the meadow and the vast shingled house, every window hot with light tonight it seemed, and the driveway still studded with cars. A party. Linnett kept on the gravel, past the house, and headed down the hill to where her cottage was.

In the dark she used her crutches as probes, sweeping them over the ground ahead of her, surveying it for rocks or knolls before she put her weight down. Her head was tilted up to the sky, the way a blind person’s sometimes is. She could hear the noise from the Thayers’, the music, the raucous voices raised above it carrying through the still night air. When she reached the safety of the little deck at her cottage front, she heaved a sigh of relief and relaxed for a moment, slumped on her crutches.

In the light of the small wall lamp she flicked on, the cottage interior looked tiny and messy. It consisted of one room, with a double bed in the corner, a large table taking up most of the space. There was a fireplace with two chairs facing it (one covered with Linnett’s clothing), and a kitchenette on the opposite wall—no stove, but built-in burners, a sink, and a half-refrigerator. Linnett thumped over to the one available chair, swung her backpack down to the floor, and sat.

Her mind whirled for a moment with the evening’s events. She shut her eyes and saw again the table in candlelight, felt the warmth of the conversation; the shock, then, of Lily’s remark.

A burst of laughter from the Thayers’ floated down, and she looked around herself again at the cheerless little room, the nicked furniture, cast off from the big house, no doubt.

Linnett didn’t like the Thayers. Their vegetable garden was near her cottage, and occasionally they came down with friends carrying drinks to survey it, to pick blueberries or the earliest tomatoes. Usually this occurred at the cocktail hour, when Linnett was just back from being with Lily, when she was trying to make rapid notes on things she’d noticed—gestures, the minimal shift in Lily’s facial expression—things she couldn’t get on tape. It was for this reason that the Thayers irritated her.

And others too. She had heard them explaining once to a guest with a kind of pride of possession that she was a writer.

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