Bear Me Safely Over by Sheri Joseph

Author:Sheri Joseph [JOSEPH, SHERI]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2004-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

rapture

be careful what you wish for

At the end of summer, Florie Ballard acquired a house guest. She wasn’t sure how she had happened to say yes, when her daughter proposed that they keep this boy, board him for a year. ‘He’s practically related,’ Sidra had argued - this based on her notion that at any hour she might run off and marry the boy’s stepbrother. Florie had yet to see a ring. Back in the spring, this grown daughter had hauled her college degree along with eight garbage bags full of laundry up the staircase, stowed four scruffy horses in Florie’s barn, and hadn’t budged since.

Now another boarder. Paul needed their help, Sidra said, after getting into some trouble at home, needed a new high school for his senior year. Florie could have guessed what sort of trouble. One look at him told the story, though Sidra supplied the lurid details: an arrest for prostitution, of all things, and his parents’ house covered in graffiti in the aftermath.

‘He’s harmless,’ Sidra said. ‘The arrest was bogus. But still, he can’t stay in Greene County. He can’t go back to school there - those rednecks would kill him.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Florie tried halfheartedly. ‘People are usually more tolerant than you think.’

All that summer, Sidra had been bringing the boy to the house for little visits, nudging him toward Florie to say his hellos. So she’d guessed, even then, that something was up. The boy had a habit of cupping the side of his neck with one hand, the arm curled tight to his chest, and she found herself noticing how the bones protruded at his wrist, how fragile he looked. He’s one of those boys, she’d thought with a start - remembering the young men she had tried to forget, the ones who always surrounded them whenever she’d taken Marcy to the hospital, eighth floor, Infectious Diseases. She’d wheeled Marcy’s chair clear of them, as if they were somehow different in their contagion from her daughter. She commandeered a private corner, half-concealed by a potted palm, and refused to look. It seemed an accident that her daughter had fallen into their midst. A mistake. Somebody would need to correct it before long.

Now, back to haunt me, she thought, looking at Paul. And perhaps those thin boys she had shunned had once been very much like this one - who was healthy, young, and electric with nervous bravado, balancing at the edge of the world. It had been wrong to blame them, she knew, when Marcy bolted for the edge of her own free will. She was a girl who went as far as she could and laughed at the hands that reached for her, and the bitter echo still found its way into Florie’s dreams some nights. Paul’s laugh was not Marcy’s. Even his squinty, pale eyes couldn’t touch hers - those striking spheres, rounder than round, violet blue.

Look, look, a blue-eyed child in danger, Sidra seemed to say with every nudge.

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