lost boy lost girl by Peter Straub

Author:Peter Straub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588363169
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

What do people in Millhaven do at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings in June? Most residents of Millhaven who attend church services are already back home, changed out of the shirts and pants they wore to St. Robert’s or Mount Zion—almost nobody in Millhaven wears a jacket and tie to church anymore—into T-shirts and shorts, and they’re already mowing their lawns or working at the tool bench. Some people are driving across town to see their mother, their brother, or their aunts and uncles. A lot of women are planning meals for the relatives who will show up in a couple of hours, ready for lunch. A lot of men are thinking about piling up the briquettes in the barbecue and wondering if they should drive to the store for some nice juicy pork ribs. A number of people are watching Charles Osgood on CBS’s Sunday Morning, and a good third of those are still in bed. Hundreds of men and women are dividing their time between reading Sunday’s Ledger and eating breakfast. Hundreds of others are still asleep, and a few of those, the ones with pasty complexions and foul breath, will wake up hungover. Joggers jog in the parks and along the sides of the roads; shopkeepers open up their shops; young couples awaken beneath rumpled sheets and embrace in shafts of sunlight.

In the Sherman Park area, formerly Pigtown, chambermaids change sheets at the venerable St. Alwyn Hotel. Golfers pilot their carts, as happily as is possible for golfers, down the fairways at the Millhaven Country Club, where the groundskeepers are eyeing the greens. Hardy children thrash around in the big public swimming pools in Hoyt and Pulaski parks, where, at sixty-eight degrees, the water is still a little too cold for most people, no matter how young they are. Pop once took us all the way to Hoyt Park on a morning in June, and the cold water turned Philip’s lips cobalt blue.

On Superior Street, the only person left asleep is Jackie Monaghan, who will not slip groaning into a painful wakefulness for another two hours. Margo Monaghan is sliding a tray of cinnamon buns into the oven. In 3324, Philip Underhill sits on the threadbare, sagging green davenport and, ostensibly splitting his attention between the newspaper spread open on his lap and a strutting, roaring evangelist on TV, wonders about the identity of this Sherman Park Killer guy and how many kids he will cause to disappear before being locked up. On either side of brooding Philip, a brittle tranquillity pervades the Taft and Shillington residences. Ted Shillington is standing outside in his backyard, smoking, only half aware that his wife is glaring at him from the window above the kitchen sink. Putting away the breakfast dishes in an identical kitchen two houses south, Linda Taft shocks herself by hoping that Mr. Hank Taft might fall down dead of a heart attack before he comes in to ask her what’s for lunch.

In his abstracted and melancholy

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