Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray

Author:Jeanne Ray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307955517
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

When I got home no one was there, not even Red. I was standing in the kitchen shaking a box of dog biscuits and feeling the smallest edge of panic when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket—a text from Evie.

KEMPTONS, it said, answering the question I had not asked.

So everything was fine. I trusted Gilda to look after the dog. I barely trusted the children to look after themselves.

Having just come in from a meeting I was fully dressed. I did think it was important to be dressed while driving. Still, I put on a big bunchy scarf that had been a failed experiment from last year’s brief knitting phase. Ever since the incident with the bathrobe, I tended toward greater coverage when I was with Gilda.

Benny met me at the door and gave a couple of modest sniffs at the passing air after letting me in. I wish I could say he was on to me but I could see in his confused little eyes that he was nowhere close to putting the pieces together. “Why aren’t you in school?” I said suspiciously.

“Fall break,” he whispered, and then motioned with his hand that I should follow him. Benny was wearing his socks without shoes and he made an effort to be very, very quiet as he walked. In the den I found Gilda sitting on the couch, Evie asleep with her head in Gilda’s lap, Gilda with her hand in Evie’s tumble of golden hair. Across from her Miller sat in a chair and silently watched as if this were a particularly riveting play that had just arrived at its heart-stopping final act. Benny took up the chair beside his brother and resumed his watching as well. Red, who was on the couch near Evie’s feet, raised his head and, looking at me, gave his tail a single, definitive thump of greeting and then he put his head back on his paws.

“She just now fell asleep,” Gilda whispered.

Miller glanced up in my direction, checking to make sure I had no intention of waking her or, worse yet, taking her away. “She’s been crying,” he said, or I think that’s what he said. His voice was so quiet I was practically lip reading, a favor that was never returned for invisible women.

I sat down on an ottoman and joined the audience for my sleeping daughter. Truly she was something to behold. With her face clean of makeup (she didn’t bother with it when there was so much crying to do) and untroubled by dreams, she looked closer to twelve than to twenty. In fact, it was as if I were looking at the child she had been not so long ago, falling asleep across the backseats of so many cars. With her overlarge eyes and round rosebud mouth and thick blond eyebrows arched into wings, she was the fairest of all the Dickens heroines, Estella and little Nell and the beautiful, foolish Dora, at least that’s what I was thinking when her phone began to vibrate in her little pink fist.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.