Year After Henry Read Online Free

Evie thought. And then, the sadness hit her, right in the solar plexus, that spot that picks up the dead so sharp and so fast. Evie assumed Henry would stay close by, turning up behind Larry’s shoulder every time his brother came into the bar. But in the twelve months that he’d been gone, Henry never once bothered to peer at Evie through the veil that separates Bixley, Maine, from the other side. Not once. And Evie Cooper knew why. Henry was still mad at her.

2
    Jeanie stripped the bed in Chad’s room of its sheets, balled them up, and stuffed the wad down into the wooden hamper in the bathroom. She had given in when Henry’s mother called that morning and invited herself over for a late lunch. The excuse this time was that she wanted to borrow a book on dried flower arrangements. Didn’t Jeanie have such a book? Now Jeanie wished that she had lied. All that Frances wanted to talk about these days was Larry. Larry getting a divorce, Larry being fired from the high school, Larry spending too much time at Murphy’s Tavern, Larry not being a good mailman, as Henry had been. Jeanie was tempted now and then, in a fleeting moment, to tell Frances Munroe about those nights Henry himself had spent down at Murphy’s. And it wasn’t just to watch sports on TV and think a bit, as was the case with Larry. What would Frances say about her precious Henry if she knew about Evie Cooper?
    An hour before Frances was due to arrive, Jeanie searched her bedroom closet for the book How to Dry and Arrange Your Backyard Flowers . It was while digging past the boxes of Lisa’s and Chad’s school papers, years of them, that Jeanie accidentally stumbled upon the orange bonnet, Henry’s beloved knit hat. She still found things like that, a year later and in the strangest places, items she had forgotten were ever a part of Henry’s life. His old orange hunting bonnet. Jeanie held it up to her face, let the harsh wool scratch against her skin. And there it was, his smell, Henry’s Old Spice mixed with a splash of natural sweat. Henry Munroe, existing now in photographs in the family album, in an odor here and there, a shard of memory.
    It had been a long year, twelve god-awful months that she had had to be firm and steady for the children. First there was Lisa, the baby Jeanie had been carrying the day she and Henry stood before a Bixley judge and tied their lives together. This was just two days after their high school graduation, at a time when they were both still basking in that warm patina of peer idolatry. Henry was a star football player and Jeanie captain of the cheerleaders. How could that golden aura not follow them around forever? But he was eighteen and she was seventeen, and the sweet glow of high school victory began to fade shortly after the bills started arriving, even before Lisa did. Soon their friends found better places to party than in a tiny apartment where someone like Jeanie kept shushing everyone because a baby was sleeping in the other room. It was a fast lesson, that big bounce from one concept to another. Then, just when seven years of marriage rolled around, that risky time that old-timers claim comes with an itch to wander, Chad Henry Munroe had been born. And he had become his father’s own pride and joy, just as Lisa seemed to be Jeanie’s. Now Lisa, the baby who had compelled her parents to marry so young, was twenty-two years old and married herself. She was living down in Boston and expecting a baby of her own, what would be Jeanie’s first grandchild, a baby Henry would never know about, much less hold in his arms.
    It had been a long year, indeed, since that morning Jeanie awakened to find that Henry’s heart had finally given up, a long year. And yet she still couldn’t let go of Evie Cooper, or the fact that she had never confronted Henry about his mistress. A full year that held nights when Jeanie cried from the time she flicked out her