Crossroads Read Online Free Page A

“So you can visit us for a few days,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of room. The kids are with my mother for the summer.” She said it in such a way I understood that that was what I’d do.

3
    A FAKE-WOOD-PANELED station wagon, with a drooling black dog, its head thrust out the window in the back, pulled up, and Jennie waved. I dropped the candy bar wrapper and peach pit from the food I’d brought with me into a trash can. They were ten minutes late and the bus had been a little early. I’d eaten the candy bar while I waited, then the peach. Waiting made me nervous.
    Jennie, rushing toward me, still looked like a fox—that reddish-brown hair, the thin, pointed face, her long nose. She was still five-three and one hundred five pounds, and I felt huge beside her, as if my large bones could crush her frail bones. The opposite of course was true. She was one of the strongest women I’d ever met, and some boys couldn’t beat her at arm wrestling. She shook my hand with the firmness of a man’s shake. “So how was the trip?”
    â€œIt was good.” It was bad. A nuclear disarmament demonstration en route to the United Nations had almost made me miss the bus. Someone who looked like Zap waved a “No Nukes” banner at me and would not let the cab drive on to the
Port Authority. Where had my brother been all these months when I needed him? The bus was hot and I had to sit near the motor. A Mormon woman sat beside me and showed me pictures of her eight children. I tried to envision this woman in a red leisure suit in bed. Then she interrogated me. “You married? Kids?”
    Tom laughed as he swept me into his arms. My feet dangled in the air and I clutched his shoulder. He’d put on a little weight and lost some hair around the crown, but mostly he looked the same. He wore a blue T-shirt that said “I’ve Got Charisma,” and held on to me a little longer than he should have. “You’ve changed,” he said, scooping up my suitcase and heading toward the station wagon.
    â€œHey, what’s that supposed to mean?” I rushed after him, but Jennie caught me by the arm.
    â€œYou know he says stupid things.”
    â€œI know, but you forget.” I’d forgotten a lot, it seemed. I’d forgotten how Jennie was always a little formal when we hadn’t seen one another for a while. I’d forgotten she was always a little late with some dumb excuse and that Tom said things without thinking. It had been almost ten years.
    â€œSorry we were late. Aretha Franklin got out at the last minute. That’s the dog. We keep saying we’re going to send her to obedience school.” Jennie slipped her arm comfortably now through mine. Tom went on ahead. “God, it’s good to see you.”
    â€œYou look the same,” I said to her. The first time I saw Jennie she was walking a raccoon on a leash down our street and she handed me the leash. “You walk him,” she said. “He likes strangers.” The raccoon’s name was Calcoon; she’d found him sleeping in a garbage can. He’d taken to her immediately and later she told me Calcoon was the first thing she ever loved. I was the second. My brother was the third.
    Our friendship, mine and Jennie’s, was based on proximity. We walked the same route to school four times a day for years. Later, it would be based on conspiracy. She was my best friend
long before Zap made the mistake of falling in love with her.
    We both watched Tom as he walked ahead to put my things in the car. Everyone had been surprised when she married him and some had suspected she had to get married, but that wasn’t so. There had been something large and rather stupid about Tom’s body when we were teen-agers. Even though he had the first perfect back I ever saw, I felt certain he’d grow flabby with age. The jowly cheeks and soft paunch of a shoe salesman. But