Drowning of Stephan Jones by Bette Greene

Author:Bette Greene [Greene, Bette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-2583-7
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

WITH A PRACTICED hand, Carla brushed her auburn hair, which shone with an inbred luster reserved for the young, the healthy, and the beautiful. By the time she had slipped the saffron party dress over her head, she looked as though there were nothing she could possibly add or subtract that would make her look more radiantly beautiful than she looked right at this moment.

And as she inserted a pearl earring into her lobe, she became aware that Judith was standing at the threshold of her room. “You know, you were right, Mom,” she said with a quick toss of her head. “The pearls really do work better than the rhinestones.”

Judith smiled because she found her daughter’s words resonating through her: ... you were right, Mom. She really liked savoring the moment while trying to remember exactly how long it had been since she had heard her daughter speak those words. Not for quite a while. For way too long a while.

However, there used to be a time, and not all that long ago, when Judith would come home brimming with her stories of the never-ending struggle at the library against too many demands on too few resources. Even when she was able to foster an uneasy peace on that front, there was always the second front to contend with! That was the force that was inevitably led by a sincere and vocal group who fought tirelessly for what they believed. What they believed was that it was the duty of the library to reflect only the values that were their values. After all, weren’t they the ones, the only ones, with a personal relationship to Christ Jesus?

Judith often found comfort in telling real behind-the-scenes stories to Carla because her daughter was absolutely therapeutic when she’d cheer her mother’s victories and rail against her defeats.

But ever since Andy Harris had charged into Carla’s life, Judith noticed that the only time she seemed to gain her daughter’s complete approval was when she waved high her personal white flag of compromise or defeat.

Although Judith’s last tension-filled conflict had taken place a few weeks earlier, she was too afraid of Carla’s recent lack of empathy for her feelings to even mention it. It started innocently enough when the library in celebration of Earth Day put up a display titled, “In the Beginning ...” On the display table were a collection of books by renowned physicists, geologists, social anthropologists, archaeologists, and others giving their most current and reasoned explanation of how life evolved on this planet. The paint wasn’t yet dry on the poster-board sign when Mrs. Wooten stormed in demanding that the “unholy” display be taken down and the books returned to the back library stacks “where they’d do less harm.” Mrs. Wooten’s problem was that these “tainted” books were at odds with the two-thousand-year-old explanation that had already been offered in Genesis.

When Judith had refused to either take down the sign or break up the display, Hilda Wooten temporarily retreated to

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