LITMIR.BIZ

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She followed Pearl, wearing a snappy red pantsuit and a heart-shaped broach, down the paper-goods aisle, waited while her mother debated between Angel Soft and Dream Puff. “Lucy, go pick up some milk and let’s get out of here.”

      “He’s taking her out for a Frugals,” Lucy said.

      “Good for him,” Elizabeth said, although the idea of Matt and Sarah being a twosome again made her feel weird. Still, maybe it would be good for Matt to get a life instead of working all the time. He looked like hell these days. Like he hadn’t seen sunshine for ten years or something.

      When she told George that her ex-husband was a doctor, George figured she must have all kinds of money. A doctor’s wife, he kept saying. And then she had to explain Matt didn’t make a whole bunch of money, not that he couldn’t, just that he chose to work at the ends of the earth. What she hadn’t told George was that Matt also drove a truck. An old truck that didn’t even have a decent stereo system.

      They continued their procession down the aisles. Next stop: jams and jellies. Lucy had disappeared again and Pearl was holding a jar in each hand and studying them as though she was about to take a test. Elizabeth couldn’t help resenting how Pearl always took Lucy’s side and Lucy always took Matthew’s side and Matthew acted as though she, Elizabeth, never had an important thought in her life. That was the good thing about George. He made her feel interesting. And smart.

      Unlike Pearl, who was now yammering on about Sarah Benedict and how smart she’d always been and what was she doing back in Port Hamilton when she could live anywhere in the world and wasn’t it rude of Elizabeth not to even give her a call to welcome her home?

      Elizabeth ignored her. Sarah didn’t need a welcome-home party. She had Matt. Sarah had always had Matt. One night after they’d been making out down at the spit, steaming up the windows of Matt’s old truck, she’d asked him about Sarah.

      “You’re not two-timing with her, or anything?” And he’d laughed. “Oh, Sarah’s my friend,” he’d said. “We tell each other everything.”

      “So you’ll tell her about us?” she’d asked.

      “Of course,” he’d said.

      And maybe he had. But you certainly couldn’t tell from the way Sarah acted. Still, she and Sarah had never been close. Sarah always made her feel dumb. And it felt uncomfortable being around Matt and Sarah, the way they were always laughing and joking, finishing each other’s sentences. It was like they had their own secret world and nobody else knew their special language.

      Overhead the music turned into a Rod Stewart song. Suddenly tears started flowing down Elizabeth’s face. That’s what I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

      AS SARAH WALKED OUT of Ming Dynasty with a container of mu shu pork, she ran into Curt Hudelson.

      “Loaded with chemicals.” Curt tapped his finger against the take-out carton and slowly shook his head. “You need to toss it.”

      “No way,” Sarah said. “My philosophy allows me a few guilty pleasures.”

      “Sorry if I annoyed your mother the other day,” he said. “Medical establishment and all that. It’s rather like trying to move a dinosaur.”

      “I wouldn’t call Rose a dinosaur,” Sarah said, slightly offended on her mother’s behalf. “Set in her ways about some things, but then she hasn’t had much exposure to alternative forms of practice.”

      Curt smiled. “Yes, well, I encounter that resistance all the time. Even with my own family. Debbi knows quite well what works, yet if I’m not constantly reinforcing it, she’ll slip right back into going to the doctor for every little thing. Her asthma is a case in point. She knows how to control it but insists on carrying that bloody inhaler.”

      “Well, I’m against taking unnecessary drugs,” Sarah said, “but asthma can be dangerous if it spins out of control.”

      “Exactly. Which is why I teach her self-hypnosis.”

      Sarah said nothing. Maybe it was the eyes, but there was something about him that made her vaguely uneasy. It was that whole balance thing, not swinging too far in either direction. She made a mental note to see if Matthew knew him.

      FORTUNATELY, Curt Hudelson’s disapproval of her mu shu pork didn’t interfere with her enjoyment of it. Later, sitting on the living-room floor, cushions piled up around her, the take-out carton in easy reach and John Coltrane on the stereo, she started unpacking the boxes she’d brought over from her mother’s house. The first one contained half-a-dozen photograph albums documenting the first sixteen years or so of her life. The earlier photos were on black paper, stuck into tiny gilt paper corners that she used to buy in small plastic bags from the Bay Variety store on Lincoln. They predated the sticky white boards with plastic sheets that she’d discovered by the time she was twelve. Taking on the role of family archivist had been an act of desperation. After a stack of the shoe boxes Rose always dumped pictures in fell from the closet shelf, spilling all over the floor. Sarah had decided to impose order.

      She speared a piece of pork with her chopstick and savored the taste.

      A storm had blown in during the night and stuck around. Wind rattled the windows, and rain lashed against the glass. Northwest weather. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. Missed everything from her past. Ted, who had left his native England as a child, seemed to have spent much of his adult life looking for a sense of place. She set the chopsticks back in the carton and carried it into the kitchen.

      “I want to feel that kind of connection,” Ted used to say when she would talk about growing up in Port Hamilton, about the generations of Benedicts who had practiced medicine there. “I want to know, deep inside me, that this is where I belong. I want to feel a part of the community, of the land. I want to know the people, I want them to matter to me personally. I want the kind of life you had.”

      As an adult, she had a less rose-tinted view of what that had been, but until she was fifteen, she really had thought everything about her life was perfect. The big red barnlike house on the bluffs above the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Her attic bedroom, with the window seat where she’d watch the Olympic Princess carry passengers and their vehicles back and forth between Port Hamilton and Victoria, British Columbia. Curling up under blankets at night, gazing at the lights across the water, imagining a Canadian girl just like her staring at the lights from Port Hamilton.

      Rose would label it nostalgic yearning, but she had always felt so safe back then. Happy. Long golden summer days, perfumed by the red and pink roses that filled the backyard. Fourth of July parades and picnics on the beach. Time in endless supply, it had seemed. At Christmas, bundled up in coats and scarves, she would hold her parents’ hands as they walked into town for the Christmas-tree lighting on Main Street. Snowshoeing and skiing in the winter, bonfires on the beach in the summer and fireworks to light the dark sky.

      Best of all, there was Matthew, the boy down the street. Matthew the star of her childhood memories. Racing their bikes along the jetty that protected Port Hamilton’s deep harbor from the choppy waters of the straits, screeching and whooping, the wind in their faces. Walking home from the beach together, wet hair and sandy feet.

      On her thirteenth birthday, she’d scrambled over huge boulders to the rocky beach, Matt right behind her. With their backs against a rock, they’d watched the shorebirds and he’d told her the Latin name of the Black-bellied Plover.

      “Pluvialis squatarola,” he’d said, and she’d burst out laughing because she thought he was making it up. She’d looked it up later, of course, and he’d been right.

      If there was a time when Sarah hadn’t been in love with Matthew Cameron, she couldn’t remember it. It wasn’t puppy love or a crush or anything like that. She’d never carved their initials into tree trunks or scribbled intertwined hearts on her schoolbooks. They’d never talked about it, this bond between them, never even held hands. She could hardly even explain it to herself, the deep, certain knowledge she’d had that she loved Matthew

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