The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [62]
She left the school and drove into town through the tree-lined streets, past the bank and the jewelry store, her longing as vast as the sky. She slowed as she passed World Travel. Yesterday, she had interviewed for a job there. She’d seen the ad in the paper, and she’d been drawn into the low brick building by the glamorous signs in the windows: glittering beaches and buildings, vivid skies and colors. She had not really wanted the job until she got there, and then suddenly she did. Sitting in her printed linen sheath, holding her white purse on her lap, she had wanted this job more than anything. The agency was owned by a man named Pete Warren, fifty years old and bald across the top, who’d tapped a pencil on his clipboard and joked about the Wildcats. He had liked her, she could tell, even though her degree was in English and she had no experience. He was supposed to let her know today.
Behind her, someone honked a horn. Norah speeded up. This road went through town and intersected with the highway. But as she neared the university, traffic grew dense. The streets were so full of people she slowed to a crawl and then had to pull over entirely. She got out of the car and left it. Distantly, from deeper in the campus, came a dark swelling of voices, rhythmic and rising, a chant full of energy that was somehow akin to the buds bursting open on the trees. Her restlessness and longing seemed answered by this moment, and she fell into the current of moving people.
Scents of sweat and patchouli oil filled the air, and the sunlight was warm on her arms. She thought of the elementary school, just a mile away, the order there and the ordinariness, and she thought of Kay Marshall’s disapproving tone, and yet she kept going. Shoulders and arms and hair brushed against her. The current began to slow and pool; there was a crowd gathering by the ROTC building, where two young men stood on the steps, one with a megaphone. Norah paused too, craning to see what was happening. One of the young men, wearing a suit jacket and tie, was holding an American flag aloft, the stripes fluttering. As she watched, the other young man, also nicely dressed, held his fist near the edge. The flames were invisible at first, an intensity of shimmering heat, and then they caught in the fabric, rising up against the leaves, the blue and greenness of the day.
Norah watched this happening as if in slow motion. Through the wavering air she saw Bree, moving along the perimeter of the crowd near the building, passing out leaflets. Her long hair was caught in a ponytail that swung against her white peasant top. She was so beautiful, Norah thought, glimpsing the determination and excitement on her sister’s face in the instant before she disappeared. Envy rose in her again, flamelike: envy of Bree, for her sureness and her freedom. Norah pushed her way through the crowd.
She glimpsed her sister twice more—the flash of her blond hair, her face in profile—before she finally reached her. By then Bree was standing on the curb, talking to a young man with reddish hair, their conversation so intent that when Norah finally touched her arm Bree turned, puzzled and unseeing, her expression utterly blank for a long instant before she recognized her sister.
“Norah?” she said. She placed her hand on the red-haired man’s chest, a gesture so sure and intimate that Norah’s heart caught. “It’s my sister,” Bree explained. “Norah, this is Mark.”
He nodded without smiling and shook Norah’s hand, assessing her.
“They set the flag on fire,” Norah said, conscious once again of her clothes, as out of place here as on the playground, for utterly different reasons.
Mark’s brown eyes narrowed slightly