The From-Aways Read Online Free Page A

I would mourn them at night, drifting through the hallways of the penthouse, running my hands along the sideboards, telling myself stories about what my life would be like had I not lost them.
    What are you doing up? my father would say when he caught me drifting around, my hair all tangled from bed, humming little things to myself as I played out these fantasies. Do you need something?
    Nothing, I would say. No. I do not need anything.
    Sara, Mary, Pippi, Harriet. My orphan heroes. I now realize I didn’t have any idea what I was playing at. How stupid a thing it was to wish for.
    I flip my pillow. Pull the blankets higher. There is a problem with my childhood list, I realize. I think of Harriet the Spy along with these other orphan girl books, even though she did have parents. Because when I think of Harriet I see a girl on a busy sidewalk, big glasses, her backpack hitched high. She has her notebook in her hands because she always has her notebook in her hands. She is there to write down secrets. I see her as very much alone.
    W E MOVED HERE knowing Henry would get a job at Arden Nursery. I would look for work, but with the house all paid for, his salary would be enough to float us. I drive him to pick up his new work truck. We walk along the busy rear lot where the land is writhing with green-scaled hoses that twine around the Ecuadorian yard workers’ ankles like snakes. A man with a Roman nose and long black hair spilling over his shoulders comes out of a greenhouse, dragging a length of hose behind him.
    “Hey, Batman, ven conmigo ?” Henry says.
    “Sure, la casa grande ?” he asks. Batman is the yard manager at Arden. His real name is Bertilio, but because the customers have trouble saying it, the younger men have changed it to Batman, which best I understand has something to do with the way he tosses his hair over his shoulder like a cape.
    “Yup,” he says. “ Vámanos. ” Henry speaks a little of what he calls landscaper Spanish. The men at Arden tease him for his gender confusion and accidental innuendos about hoses and cross-pollination.
    “The casa grande ?” I say.
    “The house they’re building out by the carousel,” Henry says. “They bought two cherry trees and asked for an estimate on the back property. Forty acres of landscaping. I wanna get a look at it.”
    Batman whistles. “The New York people who bought the Penobscot lots,” he says to me. “ That house.”
    I can tell that this seems like a glamorous project to Henry. So far Arden has sent him sawing off cancerous tree arms and spraying slaughterhouse leftovers to deer-proof rose gardens. But I wonder about this job. I have been reading in the paper that people are not happy about plans for this home, larger than any other in Menamon, even the Elm Park McMansions. A home that will sit on not one but five recently purchased beachfront lots. They don’t like how these people threw their money around to dissipate a handful of Menamon families, who, according to the local paper, “sped away from town, their trunks stuffed with out-of-state money, tails between their legs.” Again, I thought, Who is writing this copy? It couldn’t possibly be Charley.
    “You wouldn’t mind working for them?” I say. “These new people?”
    “Why would I?” Henry says.
    “I don’t know,” I say. But I am surprised. This is his town after all, the one he described to me in ways that got me dreaming about a cozy small-town kind of life. Henry in a diner on Fourteenth Street: back home a waitress would give me a talking-to for not finishing my eggs. Henry at a bar on Fifty-third: one of the fishermen got married and the bride danced on the bar in her wedding dress and a pair of boots. Henry and I at home, his feet in my face and mine in his as we lay on the couch: his parents used to spend Sundays just like this. Bow to stern, they called it. Menamon is supposed to be a place ruled by kind mothers and stoic fathers, fishermen and good folk.