Going Away Shoes Read Online Free

the outlet malls at Myrtle Beach. But later, by the time they finished quizzing her about Koi and telling her what she had missed and how much easier it would have been on everyone if she had driven them because her car had the biggest trunk and how it was the last time they had a little happy group outing before daddy died , she was sorry she had kept the date. The price paid for that trip to the movies with a nice person she would likely never see again was too high.
    There was a time when anything but white-bread mainstream was a joke in their house, even if now Wanda is desperate to become Miss Multicultural. When Debby did date a white-bread product, Troy Preston, star halfback and son of the town’s leading surgeon, they didn’t understand that, either —meaning, of course, that they didn’t understand what he saw in her.
Break the chain. Pull the plug —pull it, pull it .
    One person Debby did care about enough to call him her boyfriend happened to be black. She and Ronnie were the best fencers in the small junior college they attended. Actually they were the only fencers —part of a small intramural experiment —and not very good, either of them. They would meet in the gym severalafternoons a week to joust about, the only sounds being the squeak of their shoes on the blond polished wood and their rhythmic breathing as they circled each other in a kind of dance. One day, walking back to their dorms, they talked about how the thing they liked most of all in fencing was the mask, that it was like peering out a dark screen door. Their bodies were outside, moving in the world, while their souls remained hidden. It was a beautiful October day and the clarity of the colors and brisk chilly air made Debby almost giddy, more talkative than she had ever been. It prompted her to lean in close enough that their arms brushed and their hands naturally found each other, their fingers locked tight for that five-minute stroll as they continued discussing their sport. They liked to lunge forward, swords crossed as they pressed their weight against each other, struggling to make eye contact and hold it. There was a connection she hadn’t felt before and hasn’t in all the years since. They were all for one and one for all.
    Ronnie once asked, midlunge, eyes safe behind his mask, if it bothered her that he was black. “No,” she said, “does it bother you I’m not?” He pressed in closer. Her wrist bent, giving, and he pinned her against the concrete wall, both their swords raised overhead, and pressed his mouth against hers through the masks. The mesh of their face guards was metallic and cold, a reminder of time and place and the coach just inside the glass office door.
    “We’re a good fit,” he told her the one time she allowed him tostay in her room through the night. Stretched side by side, their bodies matched up, hipbones and ankles, elbows and shoulders. Ronnie wasn’t tall but people often asked, Does he play basketball? Can he do the moonwalk? And once recently, Carly asked about his size . “You know,” she said and giggled, caressing her hair newly dyed a shade of red that does not exist in nature. Debby hoped that her silence left all kinds of questions for Carly to mull over, but in five minutes Carly was completely immersed in telling a story about someone she knew who had had her eyeliner tattooed on even though the procedure is illegal now. Though Debby would never tell Carly or anyone else, the truth was memories of Ronnie and what it was like to be with him had for years played in her mind like a backbeat, the bass rhythm of what she wanted in life, a kind of person, a kind of relationship, a kind of freedom and security system all rolled into one.
    While her sisters go on and on about their latest interactions with their mother, telling whoever visits what they have done and “what mother said,” Debby wants to point out that they’re talking about a woman whose last truly alert moments were