Lone Star Read Online Free Page B

you?”
    â€œNone. I need a story, Mom, not musings about what it’s like to live on a puddle lake in Maine.”
    â€œPuddle lake? Have you glimpsed the stunning beauty outside your windows?”
    In the afternoons, the glistening lake, blooming willows and birches trimming the shoreline, the railroad rising on the embankment, did occasionally shine with the scarlet colors of life. That wasn’t the point.
    â€œI can’t write about skiing or bowling, or learning to drive,” Chloe continued. “I need something else.” The one ashen catastrophe in their life she could never write about. AndLang knew that. So why push it? Besides, her mother had once informed her that the Devine women were too short to be tragic figures. “We can be stoics, but not tragics,” Lang had said a few years ago, when it seemed to everyone else that the very opposite was the only thing true.
    â€œMake it up, darling,” Lang repeated, unperturbed by her daughter’s tone. Chloe watched her mother slap the printed-out rules of entry for the Acadia contest on the table. “You have five months to come up with a story and write it. After it wins, it will be published by the University of Maine Press. Properly published! In book form and everything. That’s exciting, isn’t it?”
    â€œDid you not hear me when I said I didn’t want to be a writer?”
    â€œNo. By the way, I got you the pens you wanted.” Lang produced three packages of blue pens, gel, ballpoint, and fountain, and laid them in front of Chloe. “I also took the liberty of getting you a notebook. Several different kinds to choose from. I thought you might need one if you’re going to write a story that’s going to win first prize. The Moleskine is very good. Has soft paper. But you try them all.”
    Chloe stared at the pens, at the four notebooks. “Mom, listen to me.”
    Lang sat down, elbows on the table, staring at Chloe with complete attention. She looked so pleased to be told to do what she had already been doing.
    â€œHere’s what we were thinking.”
    â€œWho’s we?”
    â€œThe four of us.”
    â€œThe four of you were thinking all at once?”
    â€œWell, discussing.”
    â€œThat’s better. It’s always good to be precise if you’re thinking of becoming a writer.”
    â€œWhich I’m not, so.”
    â€œWhat are you four up to now?”
    â€œWe were thinking of going to Europe.”
    Lang stayed neutral. She didn’t blanch, she barely blinked. No, she did blink. Slowly, steadily, as if she was about to say . . .
    â€œAre you crazy ?”
    There it was. “First listen, then judge. Can you do that?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œMom. You just said you wanted me to write.”
    â€œYou have to go to Europe to write? Did Flannery O’Connor go to Europe? Did Eudora Welty? Did Truman Capote?”
    â€œActually, he did, yes.”
    â€œWhen he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms, his first novel, he’d been to Europe?”
    â€œI don’t know. We’re getting off topic, Mom.”
    â€œAu contraire. We are very much on topic.”
    â€œMason and Blake need to do research.”
    â€œSo they’re going to Europe ?”
    Chloe made a real effort not to facepalm, a real, true, Herculean, McDonald’s supersize-sandwich effort not to facepalm, because there were few things her mother hated more than this brazen gesture of exasperation and frustration.
    â€œHannah and I have been talking about the trip for a while.”
    â€œI thought you just said you wanted to go for Blake and Mason? Make up your mind, child. Either you thought of it on the railroad tracks, or you’ve been planning it for years.”
    â€œHow do you know we were on the tracks?”
    â€œI saw you.” Lang pointed out the window. “Right across the lake.”
    Both things were true. Chloe and Hannah had been