I Promise by Joan Johnston

Author:Joan Johnston
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-06-26T05:00:00+00:00

Delia glanced at her watch as she drove up to the back door of the Circle Crown, pounded the steering wheel as she realized the time, and swore, which did nothing to ease the sudden anxiety she felt. She hopped out of her rental car and waited for Rachel, who had been following her, to pull up beside her in another rental car. She knocked on Rachel’s window, waiting impatiently for the car’s electric system to roll it down.

“It’s 4:00 P.M.! I had no idea it was so late. I’ve got to call Janet right now if I want to catch her before she leaves for the day.”

“The door’s open,” Rachel said. “It always has been. Make a run for it, Delia. I’m heading upstairs to change into something I can wear to the Amber Sky without looking like a city girl.”

Delia left her sister sitting in her car and hurried inside. The phone call was necessary, but also provided an excuse to go inside without Rachel on her heels asking how it felt to be back, a way to get past the first awkward moments home with her attention focused on something else besides the home she had left twenty years before.

But even the smells were familiar—tamales in the kitchen as she passed through, and after twenty years, gunpowder in the hall as she passed her father’s gun room. That had to be her imagination, but the odor was sharp enough to pinch her nostrils. Memories were hard to shake.

She headed for the phone in her mother’s office. That room had the fewest memories, but also the worst ones. She hadn’t expected them to bombard her from the doorway.

It was as though time had stood still. She saw her mother sitting at her desk writing checks, and herself standing in the doorway scared to death, needing to tell her mother of Ray John’s perfidy.

She remembered the mild irritation in her mother’s glance when Delia interrupted her, and the dawning horror as Delia said, in soft, halting words, what she had come to say.

Her mother had risen from her chair, her face splotched with red, the whites of her eyes visible, and headed toward her. Delia had been expecting comfort. She had gotten a vicious slap instead.

“Liar! Take back those filthy lies!”

Reeling from the slap, she had protested, “I’m not lying, Mama!”

Her mother had grabbed her hair and yanked hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. “It’s that North boy. He’s the one who’s been doing these things to you. He’s the one who got you pregnant, and you need someone else to blame for behaving like a slut. Well, I won’t have it! Marsh North can’t help himself to my daughter and get away with it. I’m calling the sheriff. I’ll have that boy arrested.”

“It wasn’t Marsh,” she said, hanging on to her hair close to her scalp, trying to ease the pain, numb with disbelief. “It was Daddy. And it isn’t only me he’s been bothering. It’s Rachel, too.

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