The From-Aways Read Online Free

a bumper sticker that says SAVE THE LOONS !
    I say, “You know I hate unexpected guests.”
    Henry palms my neck and rubs his thumb beneath my ear. He once trained as an EMT and sometimes I think he is secretly taking my pulse when he does this, seeing how worked up I actually am.
    “Family don’t count as guests,” Henry says, and as he does, Charley comes around back, through the kitchen door, with a box of beers.
    She and Henry smile at each other with their mouths closed, then hug each other. Charley claps Henry on the back. The older sister.
    “Charley, this is Leah,” Henry says.
    “Hi,” I say. “Let me help you with that box.” Charley checks out my arms like she doesn’t trust me not to drop it. She has an expressive forehead and the thick blond hair of a well-cared-for horse. I’ve been told she and Henry resemble their mother.
    “Hi,” she says, and hands over the box. Seadog Ale. “Welcome home,” she says to Henry, and hands him two sets of keys.
    “Stay for a beer?” says Henry.
    “Just one,” Charley says.
    Charley and I sit with beers in the yard while Henry puts the rest in the refrigerator. The plastic chairs we found in the basement had been chewed along the legs by a long-dead dog or something more feral. The yard is encircled by tall trees and the last light comes through splotchily. I can hear the ocean. I can hear Charley’s teeth clink against the glass mouth of her bottle.
    Charley is a journalist too. Runs the local paper. This is the other reason I have been imagining this meeting: I want to work at the Star . I’ve got to start reporting again. If I don’t find a way to write, to sweat under deadlines, to patchwork information into stories, I might go crazy.
    “You grew up in this house?” I say. Charley looks at me, like she knows I’m wasting her time with questions I already know the answers to.
    “Sure did,” Charley says. She takes out a pack of Marlboros and lights one, staring up at the house. I regret my question. I imagine this is a sad thing for her to do, to look at this house that was her parents’, and is now her little brother’s. If you ask, Henry will tell you his pops was mauled by a black bear in a squabble over blueberries. He will tell you this because, if you don’t already know it, the truth is none of your business. The truth is that Hank Lynch got drunk and sailed a too-small craft into a storm a few years after Henry’s mother, June, died.
    It seems like a good moment to ask about the newspaper.
    “Charley, I’m interested in the Star, ” I say. I could swear I saw her inhale a lungful of smoke but now she is staring at me and nothing is emerging.
    “What part interests you, exactly?”
    “Any parts that might be hiring, actually.” I had imagined we might become close in this way. Sisters, running a small paper together.
    “I hired someone a few months ago,” Charley says, and rakes her strawlike bangs behind her ears. “Come see me at the office.” She tips her beer backward and finishes it. “Nice to meet you, Leah,” she says, and braces her palms against her knees to stand.
    I HAVE TROUBLE falling asleep. Insomnia is a New Yorker’s affliction.
    Henry and Charley are practically their own species. They have their own grunting language and their own shared grief, parceled out generously between the two of them. They are the last Lynches of Menamon, unless you count me, which obviously no one does. I doubt I will ever truly be one of them, family family. It is Henry’s tribe of two, and different now that he does not have Hank or June.
    I loved books about orphans when I was small. Sara Crewe in A Little Princess, Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, Pippi Longstocking with her absent pirate father, and my favorite, Harriet the Spy, with her tomato sandwiches and secrets. I pretended to be an orphan just like these girls: a sad child abandoned at a stranger’s grand estate, my parents lost to a car accident or a tiger in Africa.