Read When She Was Good for Free Online

herself that way or not. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was, he did not require a cushion behind him to catch him if he fell. Because he wasn’t falling any longer. That was the whole trouble to begin with: he had gotten himself all those props and cushions to give him a start back into the world, and all they had done was impede his progress by reminding him of the failure he had been, right off the bat. Somehow you start thinking you’re a failure, and that there’s nothing to do about it, and so the next thing you know there is nothing you
are
doing about it, except failing some more. Drinking, and losing jobs, and getting jobs, and drinking, and losing them … It’s a vicious cycle, Myra.
    Maybe, he said, if he had gone into the Army he would have come out of that experience a different person, with some of his confidence back. But instead he had to walk the streets of Liberty Center all those years while other men were risking their lives—and while people in town wondered how a big bruiser like Whitey Nelson had got out of the fighting and dying, and pointed a finger at him under their breath for living off his father-in-law. No, no, Myra, I know what people gossip, I know what they say—and the worst of it is, they are probably right. No, heart murmur isn’t a person’s fault, I know that; no, the Depression isn’t a person’s fault either, but this isn’t the Depression any more, you know. Take a look around. This is booming prosperity. This is a new age, and this time he was not going to be left behind, not when every Tom, Dick and Harry you could think of was getting rich and making themoney that was just out there for the asking. So the first thing, she was to inform those parents that she was out of the music business as of the end of the school year. And the next thing was to think about moving out of her father’s house. No, not to Florida. Willard was probably right about that being so much running away from the truth. What he had begun to think about—and he wasn’t going to promise right off and be made a fool of a second time—but what he had begun to think about was maybe looking into one of these prefab jobs like the kind the fellow had put up out near Clark’s Hill …
    And here Myra, who had been recounting to her father all that Duane had said, became teary-eyed, and Willard patted her back and got all filled up too, and thought to himself, “Then it has not been in vain,” and the only thing that made him feel unhappy was that it all seemed to be coming about because little Lucy had gone ahead and married the wrong person for the wrong reason.
    Spring. Each evening Duane would get up from the dinner table—slapping at his knees, as though just to rise to his feet was a strengthening experience in itself—and pitting the new self against the old temptations, take a walk all the way down Broadway to the river. At eight on the nose he would be back shining his shoes. Night after night Willard sat across from him in a kitchen chair, watching as though hypnotized, as though his son-in-law was not just another man cleaning his shoes at the end of a hard day, but before Willard’s eyes inventing the very idea of the shoe brush and polish. He actually began to think that instead of encouraging the fellow to move out of the house, he ought now to encourage him to stay. It was becoming a genuine pleasure to have him around.
    One night in May the two men got to talking seriously together before bedtime; the subject was the future. When dawn rose neither could remember who had first suggested that maybe it was really time for Duane to go back to the original plan of his life, which was to be out contracting on his own. With new housing developments going up everywhere, a fellow with his electrical know-how would be swamped withwork within a matter of weeks. It was a matter of the necessary capital to begin, and the rest would take care of itself.
    Several hours later, a sunny Saturday