Read Lisey’s Story for Free Online Page A

slapstick? How many alumni dollars would that add to the coffers? Reminding herself that Scott would also have found this amusing helped . . . but not all that much. Scott, after all, wasn’t here to put his arm around her, to kiss her cheek, to distract her by gently tweaking the tip of one breast and telling her that to everything there was a season—a time to sow, a time to reap, a time to strap and likewise one to unstrap, yea, verily.
    Scott, damn him, was gone. And—
    â€œAnd he bled for you people,” she murmured in a resentful voice thatsounded spookily like Manda’s. “He almost died for you people. It’s sort of a blue-eyed miracle he didn’t.”
    And Scott spoke to her again, as he had a way of doing. She knew it was only the ventriloquist inside her, making his voice—who had loved it more or remembered it better?—but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like him.
    You were my miracle, Scott said. You were my blue-eyed miracle. Not just that day, but always. You were the one who kept the dark away, Lisey. You shone.
    â€œI suppose there were times when you thought so,” she said absently.
    â€” Hot, wasn’t it?
    Yes. It had been hot. But not just hot. It was—
    â€œHumid,” Lisey said. “ Muggy. And I had a bad feeling about it from the get-go.”
    Sitting in front of the booksnake, with the U-Tenn Nashville 1988 Review lying open in her lap, Lisey had a momentary but brilliant glimpse of Granny D, feeding the chickens way back when, on the home place. “It was in the bathroom that I started to feel really bad. Because I broke
3
    She keeps thinking about the glass, that smucking broken glass. When, that is, she’s not thinking of how much she’d like to get out of this heat.
    Lisey stands behind and slightly to Scott’s right with her hands clasped demurely before her, watching him balance on one foot, the other on the shoulder of the silly little shovel half-buried in loose earth that has clearly been brought in for the occasion. The day is maddeningly hot, maddeningly humid, maddeningly muggy, and the considerable crowd that has gathered only makes it worse. Unlike the dignitaries, the lookie-loos aren’t dressed in anything approaching their best, and while their jeans and shorts and pedal-pushers may not exactly make them comfortable in the wet-blanket air, Lisey envies them just the same as she stands here at the crowd’s forefront, basting in the suck-oven heatof the Tennessee afternoon. Just standing pat, dressed up in her hot-weather best, is stressful, worrying that she’ll soon be sweating dark circles in the light brown linen top she’s wearing over the blue rayon shell beneath. She’s got on a great bra for hot weather, and still it’s biting into the undersides of her boobs like nobody’s business. Happy days, babyluv.
    Scott, meanwhile, continues balancing on one foot while his hair, too long in back—he needs it cut badly, she knows he looks in the mirror and sees a rock star but she looks at him and sees a smucking hobo out of a Woody Guthrie song—blows in the occasional puff of hot breeze. He’s being a good sport while the photographer circles. Damn good sport. He’s flanked on the left by a guy named Tony Eddington, who’s going to write up all this happy crappy for some campus outlet or another, and on the right by their stand-in host, an English Department stalwart named Roger Dashmiel. Dashmiel is one of those men who seem older than they are not only because they have lost so much hair and gained so much belly but because they insist upon drawing an almost stifling gravitas around themselves. Even their witticisms felt to Lisey like oral readings of insurance policy clauses. Making matters worse is the fact that Dashmiel doesn’t like her husband. Lisey has sensed this at once (it’s easy, because most men do like him), and it has given