Seeking Sara Summers Read Online Free

that?
    “I’m fine,” Sara said.
    He turned the radio back up, and hummed the last refrain of Born to Run.
    They drove through the neighborhood that had changed very little during the twenty years they had lived here. It was a neighborhood adjacent to the one Sara had grown up in. She thought of Julia again, her girlhood friend. She hadn’t thought of her in years and now twice in the last twenty-four hours. Wasn’t Julia’s parent’s house three blocks over?
    “Grady, can we go down Houser Street?”
    He glanced at her, then shrugged and took the next block.
    Julia had always collected strays—kittens, puppies, and birds—anything the least bit wounded. Sara was part of her flock, as was Grady.
    Sara and Grady had grown up two streets west, in houses with the same floor plan, every other one transposed to make them appear different. Julia’s house had been in an adjacent neighborhood marked by more trees and bigger houses, where no two looked alike.
    The three of them had been best friends from fourth grade until their junior year in high school when Julia’s family moved away. The Three Musketeers they had called themselves, as lame as it was. And then there were only two of them; Sara and Grady left behind like a two-legged stool. Why was she suddenly thinking so much about the past?
    They married three years after Julia left. Sara had just turned twenty. It had been a small ceremony. Her father walked her down the aisle and sat next to his new wife, a woman very different from Sara’s mother.
    They drove in front of Julia’s old house but Grady kept his eyes forward. Was he still mad at her for leaving? All these years later?
    The small rose bushes Julia’s mother had planted with Sara and Julia’s help one hot August day were taller than Sara now. The oak tree they had climbed as children now had branches too tall to climb. And the red front door Julia had convinced her parents would look sophisticated, had been repainted by subsequent owners a smoky gray.
    Julia always wore red—red shoes, red sweaters, red dresses—as if she owned a patent on the color. Red was not a color Sara considered wearing, even now. She preferred earth tones; colors that blended into the scenery. Red’s vitality and passion was a moving target for the eyes of the world. Sara preferred safety over passion.
    They turned onto their street. Ernie and David stood in their driveway unloading 2 x 4s from their white Land Rover. Grady beeped his horn and waved, then pulled in. “I’m just going to see what they’re up to,” he said to her. “Are you coming?”
    “Not right now.” Sara waved at the two middle-aged men who always looked like they had just stepped out of a Lands’ End catalogue. They had been together as long as she and Grady.
    Like boys in a locker room, the three men surveyed the length and width of the lumber. Grady laughed at something David said and put a leg up on the back of the Land Rover as if ready to stay for a while.
    Sara’s head ached a deep, nagging reminder of how disappointed she was with her life. She closed her eyes and rubbed her throbbing temples. Like a prospector panning for gold, she swirled the past, searching for any hints of an authentic life. Her thoughts returned to Julia. Memories of her old friend became a trail of bread crumbs that she might follow to find her way out of the forest.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Grady stood over her in the flower garden, his body blocking the sun from Sara’s face. “What’s with you these days?” he asked. “You seem totally self-absorbed.”
    She rested her head on her knees. Until a year ago, when Sara discovered the lump, she had lived her life as though it had no expiration date. Those days were over. Sara hadn’t told Grady about the twinge she had had the day before. Besides feeling physically odd, there was something else; an inner knowing that she hadn’t put words to yet.
    “I guess I am self-absorbed,”