More Than Memory by Dorothy Garlock

Author:Dorothy Garlock [GARLOCK, DOROTHY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759521148
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2001-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

THE NEXT TWO WEEKS PASSED SO QUICKLY THAT Nelda wondered later how she had filled them. Her unknown tormentor had called twice. After the first call, she remembered to place the whistle she had purchased beside the telephone, and as soon as she heard the hated voice, had blown it as close and as loud as she could before she hung up the phone.

The work of getting screens ready for block-printing the patterns on the scarves she wanted to make occupied her time. After she had made several buying trips to Mason City, the dining-room table, where she had moved her supplies for the winter, was littered with cans of textile dye and screens set around a table equipped with the frame and clamps for holding the cloth. Her artwork had been completed, and now she was down to the next part of the project.

She’d also had several dates with Norris and found him to be an enjoyable companion. Outside of a few chaste kisses when he brought her home, he had made no move to plunge their friendship into an affair. Nelda strongly suspected that the image he projected was a cover-up for a man who was lonely—who missed the children who remained with their mother after his divorce and who knew their father mostly as the man who sent support money.

Norris had taken her to Shady Beach, a local nightspot on the lakeshore. They had danced to the tunes on the jukebox and had drunk tap beer with an inch of foam on the top. One afternoon they had driven to Pilot Knob, the highest spot in north Iowa, where they saw a large number of pheasants and a small herd of deer.

On the way back, they had passed Lute’s farm. The house was large, fronting on a wide lawn that sloped down to the road. His mailbox was set atop a freshly painted post surrounded by dried hollyhock stalks. A wide glassed-in porch spread across the front of the house, and behind it was a cluster of well-kept outbuildings. Nelda had avoided passing the house lest she see Meredith McDaniel there.

Nelda had been queasy every morning for a week when she sat down with the calendar and tried to figure out when last she’d had her monthly period. She had always been regular, about every twenty-eight days, and never suffered anything but inconvenience at that time of month. The box of tampons she had bought the day she met Linda and her husband on the street was unopened. Then she remembered that the last time she’d had a period was the day she had ridden on the tractor with Lute. She’d had none since.

She began to get excited. Was it possible that Lute had made her pregnant the night they spent on the couch beside the cookstove? His sperm had poured into her twice in the night and once during the early-morning hours. When they were young they had been together more than a dozen times before she became pregnant.

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