Practical Jean Read Online Free

time,” Jean had declared to Milt from the front hall. “Nothing like that is going to happen.” Then she’d just shut the door on her husband’s watchful silence and got in the car.
    The day told her to venture out and breathe, and she obeyed.
    Her deliveries took her all over town, and she plotted her course precisely so she wouldn’t waste gas doubling back. That was the sort of practical thinking her mother would have appreciated, Jean thought with some pride. And it was easy, too, because she knew the town so well. Other people might have thought of Kotemee as weightless and “quaint,” the sort of place an ambitious person would skip in and out of like something hurled. But that didn’t matter to Jean because all of her important memories were lodged in the crevices of the town. At some point in her life, she had walked or driven down nearly every one of Kotemee’s wide streets, had been in dozens of its pretty, wood-sided houses. Some of these held more resonances than others, naturally. And with her mother’s pain and death still reverberating in her head like a bell, Jean found herself running into those moments from the past more than usual as she drove. A part of her felt as if she had been exiled for years, banished to some strange, cruel atoll, and had just returned to the land that had made her who she was. She felt a need to reacquaint herself.
    On Calendar Street, Jean relived the time she was nine years old and had walked home barefoot all the way from Bonner’s Shoes. Marjorie had paid for new Converse runners and insisted on leaving the old, filthy pair at the store. But the new runners had precious, Chiclet-white soles and Jean had wanted to carry them for fear of getting them dirty. Hearing that, the saleswoman had held out the old shoes for her to put on. Jean’s mother waved them away.
    â€œShe’s got shoes,” said Marjorie. “It’s her choice not to wear them.”
    At the end of the woman’s arm, the old runners hovered in the air. “She might hurt her feet.”
    â€œThen I guess she’ll learn.”
    She did learn. Jean learned that she could walk for a half an hour with a box of new shoes in her arms and blisters rising like gumdrops on the balls of her feet, and not cry or stop even once.
    On Mott Avenue, Jean slowed past a tiny park with dogwood trees and a stone fountain. When she was six years old that fountain had seemed so huge Jean was sure it had been made by God, because she’d believed in God then. And she’d imagined that when the fountain shot streams of water skyward, those streams were wishes being whooshed to Heaven. She remembered sitting alone on the pebbly edge of the basin, her feet in the cold, green water, and sending wishes on the streams.
    On Falling Crescent, Jean passed in front of Dorothy Perks’s old house, a simple four-square painted a browny gray now, though it used to be margarine yellow. It was in the basement of that house when Jean was sixteen that a twelfth-grader named Ash Birdy had slid his hand into her underpants, because he’d been watching Craig Veere do it to Dorothy and Ash felt a lot of pressure to keep up with Craig. Jean, on the other hand, didn’t feel much pressure to keep up with Dorothy, so Ash was disappointed. Very much so. Dorothy and Jean were still great friends—she had a thank-you card for Dorothy in her bag—but what had happened later with Ash was another of those memories that stuck in a crevice.
    As it usually did, thinking about Ash made Jean think of Cheryl Nunley. Sometimes it was the other way around—an image of Cheryl made Jean’s mind leap to the boy. Either way, Ash was only a 10 percent part of the memory; Cheryl got the rest.
    Hill Street was next. At the top Jean pulled up in front of Louise Draper’s house. Louise taught Grade 9 and 10 English at Hern Regional High School, where Milt sometimes