Читать книгу A Song in the Daylight - Paullina Simons - Страница 14

But the children, the husband, they needed to eat. The children! What about the children? King’s was overrun. The entire population of Summit seemed to be clamoring for the tiny parking lot behind King’s, 20,000 cars trying to fit into 200 spaces. No one but she could do the math. She sat for exactly three seconds waiting to make the right into the concrete madness where every Escalade was honking at every Range Rover, every woman, her windows down, yelling at another, “Are you leaving?”

Larissa flipped her turn blinker, revving the engine to straight. She’d find another supermarket. She could just see herself getting knocked down by the crazy fur-clad lady in a green Hummer.

Trouble was, she didn’t know where else to go because she always went to King’s on Main. It was seven minutes from her house, two lights and a right, and had all the things she needed. The no hassle was important. Larissa worked very hard to make her life hassle-free, which is why the cast on the leg cast a pall on her otherwise sunny life. Was the broken leg the atom swerving its own way?

She decided to drive down Main Street to Madison, the next small town over, to find a supermarket there. It was only thirteen minutes away.

Over lunch last week at Neiman’s Café, Maggie had asked her, “If you could be any person in the world, who would you be?” and Larissa had answered one question with two: “Forever? Or just for a little while?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Yes,” Larissa said. “If it’s just for a little while, I’d like to be a hundred different people. If it’s forever, then no one. I don’t want anyone else’s life forever.”

They’d spent the rest of the blissful lunch thinking of who they’d like to be. Someone else other than us, Larissa concluded, because I want to know what it’s like to live a life as far away from my own as possible, and Maggie, all mischievous eyes, had said, “Larissa, you are living a life as far away from your own as possible.”

Maggie was right. Summit was already someone else’s life, thought Larissa as she drove slowly, gaping at the little shops along the hectic business district, looking for a supermarket. She could’ve easily become a professional protester with Che, maybe gone to the Philippines with her. Larissa was already far removed from her very self. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t reading.

Oh, excuses, excuses. As many as the day was long.

She had asked Jared if he would want to be someone else, and he said cheerfully without a moment’s thought: Robert Neville in I Am Legend. Larissa thought it was such an odd thing for her husband to wish for. “Completely alone in the world,” Jared explained, “trying to eke out a meager survival, hoping to stay alive till daylight because bad things that wanted to suck out your soul came for you in the night. I would want to be a vampire hunter. With silver in my pocket. Just for one day.” And then he mad-jigged in his underwear through the bedroom.

On her left Larissa spied a “Grand Opening” sign for a Super Stop&Shop. She smiled (because Asher called the chain Stupid Stop&Shop) and flicked on her turn signal, waiting patiently for the oncoming traffic to pass.

This lot was spacious and empty. She parked over by the griffin trees. Through the chain link fence in front of her lay a small local cemetery. Tall granite tombstones were haphazardly spaced out amid the slushy ground, black on white. As she took the keys from her ignition and grabbed her purse, climbing out of her shiny Escalade, she remembered! Not all of it, not even the gist of it, but the heart of it, the Dalloway quote. Something about Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then: “…that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”