Souvenir of Cold Springs Read Online Free Page A

least 55 degrees Fahrenheit, that drones have 37,800 olfactory centers in each antenna. Then she started thinking it was weird, and kept trying to distract Margaret by buying her things: a boom box, a fish tank, a set of wooden chickens that nested one inside the other like Russian dolls, an Alice in Wonderland pop-up book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was much too young for her. Also, that was the summer they went to England. When the beekeeping craze was safely over, she heard her mother say to her father, “I suppose she gets something out of these obsessions,” and for years afterward she wondered what she had gotten out of her love for bees besides a love for bees.
    â€œOr the sixth?” her mother asked, picking up Middlemarch and squinting at the painting on the cover: a woman in a fussy Victorian dress, languishing in an uncomfortable-looking chair.
    It was only the fifth time, but Margaret said, “Seventh.”
    At the end of the week, when she was beginning to feel better, a postcard came from Heather. Fast work: hard to believe, from a cousin whose busiest moments used to involve putting three coats of polish on each nail and drying each coat separately in a nail-drying machine she had conned Uncle Teddy into buying her. Margaret was glad she was home alone when the mail came; her plans were private, as Heather should have known. Margaret assumed she did know, and that was why she’d chosen to expose them on the back of a postcard.
    She took the card up to her room to read it. In her tiny cramped printing, Heather said that if Margaret was serious about coming to San Francisco, she should get in touch with Rob at his bank, where they always needed teller trainees, though the pay was lousy. Heather and Rob were in the process of breaking up. Heather was living in a tiny studio apartment, but she might be able to put Margaret up for a night or two if she didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. There was a PS.:
    As for the weather, you’ve probably heard Mark Twain’s famous line that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, so don’t expect much .
    Margaret turned the postcard over: a tinted photograph of a 1957 Chevy in front of a hot dog stand with carhops. She tried to visualize someone going into a shop and actually buying this card. Then she read Heather’s tiny cramped printing again and decided the message was hostile. But it told her one thing she needed to know: avoid Heather like the plague. She ripped the card into four pieces and tucked them in her sweatshirt pocket.
    Her mother was out at the supermarket, so she couldn’t ring the cowbell. She blew her nose and went down to the kitchen to make tea. She hadn’t had a cup of tea since she got the cold: tea with milk tasted terrible when you had a cold, like drinking mucus, and she hated tea plain. She put Heather’s postcard down the garbage disposal and put on water for a pot of Jackson’s Queen Mary, her favorite. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she stared at a photograph hanging over the sink: herself at fourteen—one of her more awkward ages—wearing a denim jacket and trying to look tough, but looking, in fact, harmless to the point of geekiness—which was why her mother had framed the thing and hung it on the wall. God forbid she should just thumbtack it up. That photograph was one of the million things Margaret wanted to escape. If she made a list of them, it would stretch from Brookline to San Francisco.
    She carried the tea and a tin of shortbread cookies upstairs on a tray. She had planned to pig out on cookies washed down with tea and make a leisurely list of her options, but before she took three bites it was clear to her that her only hope was Aunt Nell—her mother’s aunt, actually, a no-nonsense ex-schoolteacher who wore sandals with colored cotton socks and was probably a lesbian. Aunt Nell was the only one of her generation