No Place Like Home by Barbara Samuel Page A

The sidewalks were neatly tended, the paint obviously well cared for. I peered in the front window and saw the trim was preserved in its original state.
    A beauty. I could see my little sister adorning the archways with gorgeous, tasteful bouquets of dried flowers, could imagine the chintz and soft fabrics she’d choose for the furniture. It was a
home
, awaiting the touch of the mistress.
    That sudden, odd pinch of lost chances touched me again, and I frowned a little, seeing my reflection in the window when I straightened. Behind me stood my father.
    I turned around, unable to stop the sharp catch of hope in my chest. He was as surprised to see me as I was him and not able to get his stony face on fast enough to hide his expression. For one long second, we stared at each other across the thick grass of the good daughter’s house, while Malachi in all his sexy badness leaned against my car, summing up in one long body all the reasons my father still wouldn’t talk to me.
    But in that split second, I saw that his eyebrows were getting a few gray hairs, and long lines marked his lean face from nose to mouth. He was wearing blue mechanic’s coveralls to protect his clothes and had a cleaning rag in his right hand, a bucket in the other. “Hi, Dad,” I said, taking a chance. “It’s a great house.”
    He looked over his shoulder at Malachi. Then his mouth twitched and he marched around the house, following the path he’d evidently been on before my sudden appearance stopped him. He kept walking across the lawn to the side of the house, disappearing behind an overgrown lilac bush. I stared at the spot where he’d gone, willing myself to just walk away. To pull up my chin and throw back my shoulders and stalk over to the car with a saucy flip of my hair. The girl I’d once been urged me to do it, to show him it didn’t matter.
    But there were hollyhocks blooming around the lilac bush, tall stalks with red flowers, and I remembered the dolls he used to make for me out of them. I remembered riding on his shoulders, my hands tight in his thick hair, being so proud to walk into church with him, my dad, the handsome one, Romeo, the one the women all wanted to talk to for even a minute if they could.
    At my elbow, Malachi said, “Come on, sugar. Let’s go get something to eat, huh?”
    I hadn’t heard him approach, and his deep rich voice seemed suddenly very sexual, seemed as if it would carry a long way. Darkly, I hoped it would, and went down the steps.

    We weren’t far from my old stomping grounds, and on some strange impulse I didn’t bother to dissect, I drove by my old high school, looking imposing on its hill. “That’s where I went to school,” I said, pointing. “And when Billy showed up to whisk me out of Pueblo, it was right on that front lawn.”
    “That’s when you fell out with your dad?”
    “Yep.”
    He looked around me at the tall steps, real interest in his face. His long arm stretched out along the back of the seat, a very ordinary thing for such a big man to do, but the suggestion of thumb so close to my neck made me a little more aware than I wished to be. “Tell me about it.”
    A kid in a primered Impala was bearing down on me from behind, so I pulled over. Where to begin?
    “Have you ever gone to the state fair anywhere?”
    “Sure.”
    “Well, it’s a big deal in Pueblo—the biggest event every summer, especially for kids. We used to live really close to the fairgrounds, and we’d go as often as we could scrape up the money, just to hang out and listen to the bands and see all our friends.” I stopped, rolling my hands on the steering wheel, the taste, the excitement of those summer nights coming back on waves of neon and laughter.
    “The summer I was seventeen, Billy and Michael’s band landed one of the free tent shows. A good way to get some exposure, all that, you know?”
    “I remember. They did a lot of that for the first year or so.”
    “Everybody was talking about