Indigo Hill_A Novel by Liz Rosenberg

Author:Liz Rosenberg [Rosenberg, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503904064
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Louisa had done a good deal of thinking since her mother passed. Died, she corrected herself. Since her mother had died. People in Wormtown, down-and-out knuckleheads; working-class types who drank beer from the can and spat in the street, who poked fun at themselves and laughed you to scorn if you talked about your feelings—those same tough-as-nails hard-asses called it “passing” when someone died. Showed up at your house with tears in their eyes and a big box of drugstore candy in hand.

Louisa knew that her sister Michelle kept taking it personally that Alma Johansson had died without telling her girls half of what she knew about her own life. As if Michelle were to blame for her mother’s secrecy. If only she’d somehow been a better daughter, if she’d just been paying more attention, if they’d all spent more time together . . . If Sierra hadn’t been so sick, if Michelle didn’t let Joe take care of everything. Oh, Louisa could read her kid sister like a book. She’d always been one for taking on the burdens of the world.

But Michelle couldn’t have changed her mother’s basic nature. The child of a suicide no one ever talked about—it was a miracle Alma had been as happy and well adjusted as she was. Louisa knew something about hanging on to secrets. She had been keeping them all her life, for herself and for other people, too. And what did it lead to in the end? An attic space loaded full of rubbish, crammed in behind a locked door. Well, Louisa wasn’t going to wait around for that to happen to her. She would give things in her own life until the end of the week, and then something had to give. When she thought of it, as sudden as that, it made her suck in her breath. You went along and played along. Still, there was a limit to everything, and in the wake of her mother’s death and resurrection as a stranger Louisa had never fully known—in the wake of all that, Louisa gave herself a deadline. She had to keep it short, or she’d chicken out. Seven more days. To figure things out, get her own life in order. One week, seven days. The very idea made her breathless. She counted them off, one by one, as scared as she had ever been in her life.

Those seven days of waiting felt to Louisa like seven months. Or else like seven minutes. They went too slow, then they went too fast. Sometimes she almost gave up, gave back in. Why not? Maybe she could just let well enough alone. Her heart pounded like a wild bird at the cage of her ribs. She could feel herself shrinking backward in the middle of her workday, resisting a change even as part of her was moving inexorably forward.

She became diligent and extra careful at work and at home, as if her own forced goodness could forestall the inevitable. She

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