Keep Me Posted Read Online Free Page B

Keep Me Posted
Book: Keep Me Posted Read Online Free
Author: Lisa Beazley
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refrigerator. Behind a ziplock bag containing our tax returns from the last five years, I found the dust-coated shoe box of old postcards, thank-you notes, and the set of yellowing monogrammed stationery Mom gave me when I graduated college.
    Leo turned on the TV and lay on the floor groaning about his back being sore from sitting in the car all day. As the IT director for a chain of gyms, he spends his days crisscrossing Manhattan on his bike to fix one computer issue or another at the gym’s eight different locations, so sitting for long periods was unusual for him.
    I halfheartedly offered a back rub and surveyed the dozen or sodull pencils and freebie pens jammed into the jar on the desk in the foyer. The pencil jar was like a microcosm of my wardrobe, I thought: overstuffed with uninspiring items, most of them with no shot of being chosen.
    Selfishly relieved that Leo responded, “That’s all right,” to my offer, I settled in on the sofa, using a fat September
Vogue
as my lap desk, a clicker pen from a Realtor in Pennsylvania in hand, and froze. I couldn’t think of how to begin. I’d withdrawn only a single sheet of stationery and an envelope from the box, so I had to get this right if I didn’t want to get out the stepladder again. But even without the logistical concerns, I just didn’t know what to
say
. If asked, I would definitely have described Sid and me as close, but that moment of paralysis brought home the reality that many years had passed since we’d exchanged real intimacies. She was right, I thought, with a wave of sadness: I did know more about those people on Facebook than I did about her.
    I promised myself that that was going to change this year. My letter had to be a good kickoff. I didn’t want to set the tone for a year of vague updates and pleasantries. I wanted this thing to be real and meaningful.
    But first, an important thing to know about Sid: She was nineteen and single when she had River. I’ll tell you the story because having an unplanned baby at that age really changes a person.
    It was the summer of 1994, and I had just graduated from high school. Sid was home from her first year at Ohio University, where I was to join her in the fall. She had declared a perfectly Sid-like double major in biology and poetry and thrown herself wholeheartedly into the pervasive counterculture in Athens, Ohio: that of the latter-day hippie.
    In mid-June, Gretchen Steele and I tagged along with Sid and her boyfriend, Kenny Fisher, to a Grateful Dead show at Buckeye Lake in Columbus. Gretchen and I were not Dead fans—we listened to 311 and Sublime and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it sounded like a fun way to spend a summer weekend, and I’d do anything to hang out with Sid.
    To people in Sid’s old crowd, you just have to say Buckeye Lake ’94, and they know that it was pouring rain and that the band did a whole set of rain songs and an unending jam that made me wish I had split that tab of LSD with Sid, so I didn’t have to stand there swaying like a moron for twenty minutes while everyone around me went into some kind of reverential trance. At some point during the nine-hour preshow party in the fields around the stage, Sid and Kenny disappeared into his tent and accidentally made a baby.
    Kenny sold marijuana and nitrous oxide balloons out of the back of his van. This makes him sound like a real loser, but forget everything you may have heard about drug dealers or single guys with conversion vans. Kenny was kind and funny and smart—at least that’s how he seemed to my seventeen-year-old self. He was huge—six foot four and muscular except for his soft beer belly. He wore loose-fitting tank tops and board shorts, and had an animal skull tattooed on his tanned biceps. With his wraparound reflective sunglasses, fanny pack (essentially a drug dealer’s briefcase), and New Balance running shoes, he affected a sort of trend-resistant, devil-may-care attitude. Again, he sounds awful on

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