which were handed out at a separate ceremony the previous week. Webster doesn’t mind this ritual. It’s partly for the kids who have nothing else, some of whom have barely managed to graduate, who have nowhere to go next year. They get their shouts and cheers, their fifteen seconds of fame.
In the hospital, Webster and Sheila managed to get Rowan to complete two take-home finals. His daughter finished them off with ease, which suggested to Webster that she’d deliberately sabotaged herself. Elizabeth Washington called the admissions committee at the university, explaining Rowan’s recent and unusual circumstances. Rowan will go to college in the fall.
Webster sheds his jacket, and Sheila does so as well. The teachers, in their robes, fan themselves with programs. Webster yanks his tie. The weather will be a topic of conversation at graduation lunches: how off the forecasters were, how it feels more like August than June. Hairdos will be limp; shirtsleeves will be rolled.
When the principal reaches the Rs, Sheila nudges him and asks for the camera.
“That’s OK, I can do it,” Webster says of the moment when he will leave his chair and squat in the grassy aisle with the parents of the Ts and the Vs to snap a picture of sons or daughters receiving diplomas.
“I want you to be able to see it,” Sheila says. “You can’t see the real thing if you’re trying to frame a photograph.”
“You know how to use this model?” he asks, afraid that at the last minute Sheila won’t know which button to push.
“I do,” she says.
When the principal reaches the middle of the Ss (and there are always a lot of Ss), Sheila slides past him and makes her way toward the front, running bent over in her white silk top and black trousers. He notices that her feet are bare.
He glances up just in time to see Rowan on the stairs to the podium. He hears his daughter’s name called. Rowan Webster. As she walks across the stage and shakes the hand of the vice principal, many students clap and shout. Webster, surprised, adds his own catcall and whistle. It’s the injured-player syndrome, the audience applauding the fact that Rowan is there at all, that she can walk across the stage just like the others. Rowan smiles, flips off her mortarboard, bends, and points to the bare patch at the top of her head. The audience roars.
Before Rowan leaves the stage, she poses for the formal picture that every student will receive during the summer. In it, her face will be turned, and Webster and Rowan will remember why. She’s searching for her dad, who is waving with both hands.
That’s it, Webster tells himself as he surveys the field with all the parents and their children. That’s all I need in life.
Sheila slides into her seat. “I got some good ones,” she says. She bends to put her shoes back on.
Webster, as if he’s done it every day of his life, as if he did it just the day before, trails his fingers from the small of Sheila’s back to the nape of her neck.
Sheila turns her head. “Go slowly and be careful,” she says.
Acknowledgments
My tremendous thanks go to Linda O’Leary, EMT-I with the Manchester Rescue Squad of Manchester, Vermont, for her hours of help with the EMT scenes. Any mistakes are my own.
Many thanks also to Genevieve Martland for her tour of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Again, errors in that chapter are mine only.
Thanks are not enough for Asya Muchnick, my lovely and gifted editor; for Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my lovable, full-service agent; for Michael Pietsch, to whom I owe everything; for Terry Adams, my loyal and savvy paperback editor; and for John Osborn, love of my life.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Welcome
Dedication
Begin Reading
Eighteen years earlier
2009
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Anita Shreve
Copyright
Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of fifteen previous novels, including A Change in Altitude; The Pilot’s Wife, which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England’s Orange Prize. She was awarded the John P. Marquand Prize in American Literature. She lives in Massachusetts.
ALSO BY ANITA SHREVE
A Change in Altitude
Testimony
Body Surfing
A Wedding in December
Light on Snow
All He Ever Wanted
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
Fortune’s Rocks
The Pilot’s Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Anita Shreve
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: November 2010
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ISBN: 978-0-316-12916-9