Read Home Leave: A Novel for Free Online

Kriegstein, who received Honorable Mention for her turkey, Feathers, in 1965, at the Chariton County Fair, and who had 100% attendance in 11th grade, has gone on to become Chariton High’s star librarian.
    What else is there to say? That she almost wore my wedding dress? That I know she goes to the Mexican bar for salsa nights, because of what Gladys Maynard told me? I suddenly understand poor Jim Laurence’s predicament. I want to spice things up, to give Beth a husband and a volleyball medal and a great career. But that isn’t Beth, or it isn’t who Beth has become. I start over.
    BETH PUTS THINGS WHERE THEY BELONG
    Even when she was a little girl, Beth Kriegstein had a real talent for organization. I don’t just mean she was tidy. She had a certainty that everything had a place. She would drive her dad crazy keeping stray kittens or storing all her magazines in the barn, never throwing anything away. About a year ago, she noticed that her dad and me weren’t doing so hot. I was dizzy and Dad was having trouble getting around. That’s how we wound up here, at Wittenberg Village. The way she used to know the second it was time to move her calf to a bigger stall, she knew it was time for us to leave the farm. I’m not saying she forced us here. She watched us close and she knew it was time. To be honest, I don’t like it here all that much. The food doesn’t look the same as it did on the brochure, and it’s creepy to me when I hear folks cry out at night. But I trust Beth to know what’s best and where we belong.
    I hadn’t meant to make it so much about myself. But when I try to rewrite it I just come up blank, so I keep it as it is. The next day, when Frank is at physical therapy, I go to the director’s office and ask if I can make some photocopies, something I learned how to do when I used to help the church out with secretarial work. I make enough for every vegetable. Then I call up Jim Laurence and tell him I have extra-credit work ready for him; he just needs to pick it up. He starts blabbing about scanning again until I tell him to shut up and drive over here.
    I meet him out front, so Frank won’t see. Jim is taller than I thought he would be, with dyed black hair. He sounded so weak on the phone I’d pictured a short, fragile kid with freckles and glasses. I ask if he plays ball, and he says he is more into video games. I hand over my article. Tell your teacher you interviewed me, I say.
    “Who’s this?” he asks, skimming it.
    “Chris’s sister,” I say. “Your librarian.”
    “I don’t go to the library,” he says.
    “Well, you make sure she gets a copy when it comes out.” I make him promise.
    *  *  *
    The article isn’t the big hit I imagine when I hand out the photocopies at the cafeteria that evening. People glance at it, then spill gravy all over it. Frank doesn’t like it one bit.
    “You didn’t even mention her 4-H prize,” he says. “And you make me sound like a jerk.”
    My media privileges are revoked for one month. “I thought she was photocopying songs for the choir,” the secretary explains to the director in the meeting I have to go to the next morning.
    Even Beth hates it when it appears in Tiger Tracks a week later. “That’s what you think of me, Mom? Someone whose greatest talent is being obsessive-compulsive?”
    I don’t ask her what that means.
    Some would describe it as a disaster. But I feel oddly satisfied. I know that we can’t live on our own anymore. I know the farm is gone, that Chris has his own life, that his taking over the farm was never a possibility. As soon as I saw the whole crowd roar and rise to their feet as Chris sunk a shot from the half-court line, even the opposing team, I knew that he would leave Chariton soon enough. I know that assisted living is what’s done with old folks nowadays, even though I waited hand and foot on Frank’s mother when she was ill and bedridden.
    Ever since we moved here, I’ve wanted to turn over