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.Daring to conquer new worlds, rather than abide in pain in the old one.He was looking for a father in the likes of Captain Kirk.Maybe a sister in that black woman who wore the short skirts.Yet, to this day, Mattie couldn’t be sure where Sonny’s pain had come from.Maybe in the way big, looming Lester had made him feel tiny as a mite.Maybe that was it.And no matter how big Mattie tried to make Sonny feel afterward, it never seemed to do any good.Maybe that was the answer, Mattie decided, sitting on her summer porch and gazing at Venus.Maybe that was Sonny’s secret.He had lived as a handful of taffy between his mother and his father all his life.He had been pulled in so many directions, stretched here and there, that all he could do was plaster a mighty smile on his face and set about life hoping to become Mattagash, Maine’s Biggest Underachiever.And he had succeeded.But now he was underachieving on television, with a bevy of cops watching him do it, and trouble was floating in the air like a good old river breeze.The girls were back, Rita and Gracie.They pulled up to the house in Rita’s big black Buick, the radio playing loudly.Both car doors opened, slammed, feet trod upon the porch, and then they disappeared inside the house without having seen her sitting in the shadows.Her girls were home from the hunt, from the battle, from the assault on Sonny’s life.Mattie released the breath she’d been holding, and it seemed as though even the peepers in the swamp heard her, for they grew still for a moment.A blinking light appeared in the sky above Venus and Mattie saw that it was an airplane.Or maybe it was the Enterprise.She watched as it slowly ate a path across the sky and then disappeared behind the farthest mountain range.The door opened again and Gracie ambled out, with that little bounce to her gait that she seemed to have acquired after Charlie left her for Sally Fennelson.“It’s a bit chilly out here, Mama,” she said.“You want me to bring you a coat or something?”Mattie shook her head.“Thank you, Gracie, all the same,” she said, “but I got my handmade sweater keeping me warm.” She smiled, and in the light wafting out from the living room window, she saw Gracie smile back.How long had it been since this kind of soft emotion floated between them? But every once in a while, and who knew for what reason, Mattie and her daughters, one at a time, seemed almost ready to bust down all the walls they had put up, those years of architecture.And then a little wind would come up and blow all those good designs away.And it did just then.“You ain’t sitting out here planning on sneaking a ride to Bangor, are you?” Gracie asked.“At least, we’ve been inside wondering about just such a thing.You think too much when you’re sitting in your rocker, Mama, and I mean to tell you that you’ve thought up some doozies in your lifetime.” So Gracie had come as a spy after all.Mattie smiled again at her youngest daughter, born in 1954, a mere month after Martha Monihan had stopped by the little mushroom house to announce to her best friend, Mattie Gifford, that Lester was in bed with Eliza Fennelson.Mattie still had an ornamental plate tucked away in her trunk of special things, a birthday gift from Martha, back when they were still in school.The artwork showed two little girls walking hand in hand across a meadow of bluebells.The word Sharing was painted in red swooping letters above their heads.Below their feet, at the bottom of the plate, was the sentence That’s What Good Friends Are For.Mattie had almost laughed that day she had finally tucked the pretty plate away in her trunk, where she wouldn’t have to look at it.I didn’t know you meant sharing husbands, too, Martha, she had thought as she wrapped the plate in tissue paper.And, if she told herself the truth, sitting there in her rocker, with Gracie hovering in the light drifting out of the living room window, she hadn’t been in her best frame of mind to accept Gracie into a burdensome world.She had given birth to Gracie after losing her best friend to her husband.That had been Gracie’s trousseau.Maybe Mattie even sent her a kind of jolt she never got over, right through the umbilical cord, a trait in life that would ensure that her own husband would be unfaithful.After all, why Gracie? Why not the other girls? Yet Henry Plunkett and Wesley Stubbs were as faithful to their wives as husbands could possibly get without being family pets.Only Gracie knew what it was like to wake up at night and feel how cold sheets can get on the empty side of a bed.But it was even wider than that, this scab that grew over their family life, this hideous scar.There was something about how Lester doted on his daughters—they were women, after all—that had always torn at Mattie’s heart.This was true, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there anguish in seeing him tousle their hair, cuddle them onto his lap, tweak their noses, tickle them into silly confessions of childhood pranks? He had stopped touching his wife, stopped touching her in that loving and tender way that takes place in a kitchen, or in a living room, just weeks after they were married.He only touched her in the bedroom, until, with so many other bedrooms to keep warm, he even forgot about her there, too.But what was even worse, or as Mattie came to feel over the years, was that he never touched his boy, Sonny.“Because he’s a boy, that’s why,” Lester would always answer
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