Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates Page A

hazardous adventure – or rather into adventure as hazardous as she might ever care to have it be.
    There had lately been a great deal of talk in the house about “Putnam County,” and she’d come to dread whatever that might turn out to mean, though both her parents assured her she would like it. Then one morning a huge red moving van backed carefully up to the kitchen door and men came tromping inside and began to take everything away – first the storage cartons that she’d anxiously watched her parents packing and sealing for the past few days, then the very furniture itself, and the lamps and the rugs – everything.
    “Let’s get started, Michael, okay?” her mother said. “I don’t think she wants to watch this.”
    So instead of being allowed to stay and watch it she rode alone in the back seat of the car for a very long time, holding an old and grubby Easter bunny that her mother had said she could bring along if she wanted to, trying to overhear and understand as much as possible of what her parents were saying to each other up in the front.
    And the funny part was that after a while she wasn’t frightened anymore: she had begun to feel a reckless exhilaration. What if the men did take the whole Larchmont house apart until it fell into rubble and dust? What if the moving van did get lost on the road and never arrive at wherever it was they were supposed to be going? What, for that matter, if her father didn’t know where they were supposed to be going either? Who cared?
    Oh, who cared? Laura Davenport and her father and mother would always be safe in the shelter of their own car, traveling easily through space and time; and this very car might come to serve, if necessary, as a small but adequate new home for the three of them (or even for four of them, if her wish for a baby sister ever did come true).
    “How’re you doing, sweetheart?” her father called back to her.
    “Fine,” she told him.
    “Good,” he said. “Won’t be much longer now; we’re almost there.”
    That meant he did know where they were going. It meant everything was still essentially all right and life would probably soon come back to normal, or to something as close to normal as her parents were able to arrange. And Laura was relieved, but at the same time she was oddly disappointed: she couldn’t help feeling she might have liked things better the other way.
    *
    A day or two after they’d moved into the new house, with their belongings intact but still in disorder, Laura went out to fool around on the terrace at the front door where her father stood working with an unwieldy pair of hedge-clipping shears. He was trying to cut some of the thicker vines away from the base of the spiral staircase, and she watched him until it got boring; then she was startled to see a girl of about her own age walking steadily toward her across the wide expanse of grass.
    “Hi,” the girl said. “My name’s Anita; what’s yours?”
    And Laura acted like a baby, sidling around to hide behind her father’s legs.
    “Oh, come on, honey,” he said impatiently, and he set the shears down in order to reach back and bring her out in front of him again. “Anita asked you what your name is,” he told her.
    So there was nothing to do but take a brave step forward. “My name’s Laura,” she announced, and snapped the fingers of both hands.
    “Hey, that’s neat,” Anita said. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”
    “My father taught me.”
    “You have any brothers and sisters?”
    “No.”
    “I have two sisters and one brother. I’m seven. Our last name’s Smith and that’s very easy to remember because it’s one of the most common names in the whole world. What’s your last name?”
    “Davenport.”
    “Wow, that’s a big long one. Want to come over to my house for a little while?”
    “Okay.”
    And Michael called his wife out onto the terrace to watch the two little girls walk away together. “Looks like her social life