A Simple Thing Read Online Free

arrows pointing directly to God, was “North Shore Road.” Sounder pioneers may have had guts, but they didn’t have much creativity.
    â€œWhat?” Betty said.
    â€œThe new girl,” Hood said. “Is she hot?”
    â€œI didn’t ask for photos with the rental application,” Betty said, her voice dry. “My mistake. I don’t think I can break the lease if the daughter is ugly.”
    Hood rolled his eyes. “Very funny, Grim.”
    â€œSusannah also has a son,” Betty said. “I think he’s ten or eleven. I hope you’ll make him feel welcome, too.”
    â€œIt’s weird they’re coming here in October,” Baker said. “School’s already started. Why are they moving?”
    â€œI’ve told you everything I know,” Betty said. “Susannah said they needed a change, and she’s had some interest in the San Juans since she was young.”
    â€œIt’s weird they’re coming here at all,” Hood said.
    Betty didn’t add that Susannah had mentioned her daughter had had some “behavior problems,” and that she hoped the different pace of life on Sounder might help. Let her come to Sounder with a clean slate, Betty thought. It’s what she herself had tried to do when she’d arrived with Bill all those years ago. They’d purchased the farm sight unseen and arrived with all kind of hopes for their fresh start, even though they’d been married four or five years by then.
    And Sounder had worked its miracles, for a while. Those first six months, once she got used to the hard work involved in living without electricity or indoor plumbing, she had relaxed deep inside in a way she’d never experienced before. What had undone her then, and driven her off the island for a while, had had nothing to do with Sounder, and everything to do with the man she’d married.
    When she returned, it was with a different kind of hope: hope for her child. That’s what drew her back to Sounder, and that’s what had kept her here over the years, through bouts of loneliness and boredom. Sure, she’d get letters from her sister Bobbie in Seattle about a party she’d thrown or a movie she’d seen or the fabric she’d bought to redecorate her living room, and Betty would think, I could leave. I could take Jim and go home, and I could see a movie and live in an apartment with a dishwasher and electric light and never have to look at another goddamned chicken as long as I live.
    But then she’d look at Jim, at her sensitive, brilliant boy, and see the ways Sounder nourished him, from the long wild rambles he took alone in the woods to the library of books and comic books he read over and over (since they had no television) to the gang of kids he’d known since birth—and God knows there was a gang of them back then in the early sixties and seventies, when forty-five children had filled the schoolhouse and swelled the old post office (now the Laundromat) almost to bursting at parties. It wasn’t just the kids; it was the parents, too, who knew each other’s children as well as their own, encouraged them and disciplined them as their own, who were a community in every sense of the word.
    When she thought of moving to Seattle and trying to find a job—at thirty-three or thirty-four, with no employment history, and her only skills things like the ability to pluck a chicken in five minutes flat or to stitch up a man’s arm with boiled white cotton thread and a sharp needle—she grew afraid. She couldn’t support herself and Jim, and even if she did find a job, what then? Who would watch Jim while she went out to work eight or ten hours a day? They’d have to live in a small apartment, and who knew what neighborhood they’d be able to afford. One sister was ill and still lived at home; her other sister was married, with a house and family of her own. No, the best