The Sweetest Days by John Hough

Author:John Hough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

twenty-one

Whitney Tilden may have put up the money for purchase of the fifty acres of ridgetop woodlands for our hospital by then, but construction was some years off and wouldn’t be completed until after Tilden mashed his Aston Martin against a telephone pole on this same Route 26, ending his short happy life. And so the only hospital this side of the two bridges was in the town of Hyannis, which lies west of Dover on the Nantucket Sound.

Another difference between today and that night in April, 1964: Route 26, between the outskirts of Dunstable and Dover, wasn’t much more than a country road. Scrub woods walled it in on either side, with here and there a filling station, a package store, the Sea Breeze Diner, McNally’s Seafood Restaurant, a country church or two. Drive this road now and you pass malls, warehouses, pillared entrances to gated communities. You hit traffic lights, some within a few miles of each other. The traffic is steady, even late at night, and keeps you honest at forty, forty-five. But in those days, except in the summertime and often even then, cars were few and far between after ten o’clock, the roadway unspooling in darkness, empty and lonesome feeling. If you were in a hurry, or just felt like it, there wasn’t much impediment to speeding, as Whitney Tilden so fatally demonstrated.

We passed the great orange-and-yellow tent of the Music Circus just outside Dover, and I spoke of the musicals I’d seen here, my parents driving me over a couple of times a summer, with Jill when she was old enough, and how strange I thought it was that my irascible father enjoyed not just the sly wit and blunt comedy of Broadway shows, but their romance and sweet sorrow as well.

“Me, I’m a sucker for the leading ladies,” I said. “Marian the librarian. Miss Sarah Brown, the Salvation Army girl. They’re always beautiful, these actresses, and they have beautiful soprano voices, and I fall in love with them.”

I looked at Corinna. She nodded, smiled slightly, but the strain still showed in her lovely ashen face, her worried eyes. I was trying to distract her, as she and the doctor had urged, with this vapid monologue.

“Dad likes the women who get billing under the leading ladies, the ones that are there for comic effect. Adelaide in Guys and Dolls. That little tart, Ado Annie, in Oklahoma! They’re the ones with the pizzazz, he says.”

I looked at her again. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“Take the Tylenol.”

“It hasn’t been an hour.”

“It almost has. Take it.”

She found her purse, fished around for the plastic vial Sutton had given her. She uncapped it.

“He should have given you something to drink,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

She tilted her head back, showing her soft white throat, and tossed a pill into her mouth. She bowed her head, swallowed, and made a face.

“Take another,” I said.

“Why?”

“You always take two.”

“He didn’t say that.”

“He thought you knew. Go ahead.”

Corinna swallowed another pill. We were in the country now, the road empty, our headlights scraping the low woods to our right.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.