The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

Author:Roland Merullo [Merullo, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780307452948
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Sands maneuvered the truck out of the tangle of Boston traffic and onto the interstate, and neither of us said a word as he drove north into the hills. By the time we left the big highway and turned onto the far eastern end of Route 112, still more than three-quarters of an hour from my house, I had paged through the book twice, slowly, and read a little about the designs I liked best. A hundred questions had risen up in my thoughts but it was hard to make myself say anything to Sands just then. I was thinking about the expression I might have seen on his face in the restaurant, about the feeling it made in my body, and about the museum, and about Boston, and about his pastor, and about Aunt Elaine, and about how I was going to keep my mother and father from seeing the book and finding out where I’d been. On top of all that, as we drove, it began to seem to me that there was something troubling in Sands’s silence. It made me think he was angry at me, or disappointed, and I didn’t understand what I’d done.

“I’ll drive you home if you want,” he said, and I clearly heard a sour note in his voice.

“No. I like of to walking that road.”

I saw a wrinkle of what appeared to be hurt around his mouth. When we’d gone about halfway from the interstate exit to the corner of Waldrup Road, he said, “I want,” and then paused a minute, and went on, “I want you to talk with me the way other people talk.” He turned his face to me across the seat for a second, then back at the road.

“Why for what?”

He moved his shoulders up and down. The shyness was on him again, and something else. “Because I know you can. Because I know how smart you are, and talking the way you talk makes you sound like you’re very young, or … slow … that’s all.”

“Why could it matter for at you?”

“I’m just asking you to. I’m not telling you. I’m not saying it will have any effect on working with me. I’m just asking.”

“That’s why you made me going at Boston?”

Sands pushed his foot down hard on the brake and skidded the truck onto the gravel shoulder. The beads on his rearview mirror swung back and forth. He let out a big breath then snapped the key to off and faced me. I could see clearly then, in spite of all his praying and peace talk, that there was a part of him that could hurt a person. I could see it in the way the breath went into and out of his chest, so much like the way my parents breathed when they were upset, but with something else on top of it.

“Look,” he said, not loud but with a lot of force. “Will you let someone be kind to you without always suspecting them of having a bad motivation?”

I just stared at the scar on top of his forearm.

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