Where We Are Now Read Online Free Page A

dog.
    â€œGo away,” He shouted.
    Shifting a bit, he vomited in Kate’s flowerbed to the right of the door. He pushed himself up, walked over to a hose coiled round a rock next to the faucet in the yard, washed out his mouth, swallowed clean cold water, and wheeled around to spray Roary who, when he saw what Ambrose intended, swerved, and ran toward the barn.
    Ambrose chased him, hose in hand, water spewing until he outran it and let it slip from his grasp.
    Roary watched him from the barn door with such a complacent look Ambrose bent down to pick up a rock but when he found one, the dog had retreated inside.
    Walking slowly, he blinked his eyes against the barn’s semi-darkness. Enough light filtered in through doors and cracks to let him make out Roary’s shape ambling through the door on the far side. Ambrose sighed and dropped the rock where he was leaning next to a horse stall. Except to accompany his brother, he’d never had a reason for being in the barn. Once he’d left their father’s farm he’d avoided pens and barns altogether. Though he sometimes strolled in parks and on lawns, he tended to avoid the outdoors entirely. His future was to be spent inside. He meant to live in high ceilinged rooms, in great halls with shining floors, chandeliers, and grand pianos.
    Well…his back slid slowly down against the stall’s rough boards as he sank to the ground, knees raised chin high. Well…here he was in the barn again smelling dried hay, dust, and horse manure.
    After years of planning, of practicing, and training on his first instrument, an old spinet his teacher’s father had built himself, he’d run away from the farm and the long days of working its earth, found work in Knoxville as a gardener, got nowhere. Grubbing in the ground just as he’d done at his father’s farm. But he’d held up his head, found friends, moved to Charleston, worked his way. He threw his head back remembering the sound of notes coming through an open bay window while he pulled dead iris leaves from the flowerbed below the sound of someone playing. Inside he discovered another teacher, the need to go north to study in New York, and eventually a conservatory. Then he’d turned back to the south, to Charleston where he might find pupilsmore easily. He pulled himself off the barn’s dirt floor. At his feet dribbled paint spotted it, blue, a trail of it…blue as Josephine’s mocking blue eyes.
    â€œBlue paint keeps wasps from nesting on the porch ceiling,” his sister-in-law once told him. Kate…the scourer of corners, polisher of fruit and furniture, the one who ordered silver and shoes shined.
    â€œLight of my life,” Edgar called her. He liked a clean house as long as he didn’t have to clean it.
    A fly hovered over Ambrose’s forehead. He brushed it off with one hand and heard his own voice’s lonely sigh. He got up and started through the barn’s central aisle following the trail of dribbles to the storeroom door, pushed it open and found, among the clutter, a large bucket of blue paint. Nearby a brush soaked in a glass quart jar partially filled with turpentine. He nudged the jar with his toe. Someone had obviously left it there in too much of a hurry. Dangerous to leave turpentine open. George and Edgar came out to the barn to smoke. Kate wouldn’t let them light a cigar in the house. Dogs, tobacco, and most of the whisky stayed outside. There it was. Bourbon, three bottles, one two-thirds empty under a pile of old harness in the corner. Ambrose bent over, reconsidered, and decided against another drink. He couldn’t hold whisky on his stomach long enough to benefit much by it.
    Josephine, damn the woman for being led by her snooping father. Milstead Dupey, such an upright fellow. Never had a bit of fun, lived behind a blameless looking white picket fence straight as his spine. Ambrose picked up the bucket of paint and the