Mormama by Kit Reed

Author:Kit Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER 28

EXTRACT

Dakin Ellis, his book

April, 1920

I should have died in the war. Europe was in flames. God knows I wanted to go. There is nothing for me here. I wanted us to meet in the trenches, just Randolph and me, never father and son. Two grown men, without portfolio, with no shared past and a common aim. With no history between us, we would win that war together, everything possible because nothing went before.

Lord, how I wanted to hear that shout. I wanted the Greek Recognition scene— Father! Son!— the gratifying smack of flesh on flesh. The past erased, everything resolved. Hope sprang up when Dakin Junior enlisted. Ellis men in the trenches, brothers in arms. Guilt gnaws at me as I write. My namesake was never my favorite son. I would have sold my soul for a chance to fight alongside the boy I lost. Dakin and Randolph, comrades in arms.

That was never possible. There was bad blood between us long before he bolted. I blame Manette.

God knows I wanted to serve, but they wouldn’t let me go. Not the doctors. They would have turned their heads and moved along. Ours was the war to end all wars. We were dying in great numbers, our boys bleeding out on foreign soil. The situation was so dire that they sent everybody to the front.

They forbade me. Not the doctors. It was the women. I blame Manette.

My wife draped disdain in false tears, mewling until the bubble over her mouth popped and words fell out.

“Dakin, you’re too old.”

Never mind what I said. She wasn’t listening.

“Think of your children!” She meant Everett. To Manette, the others were ciphers, and Randolph was a stranger to her.

I raged. I begged.

At last she said what she really meant. “Don’t turn me into a widow, you inconsiderate old…”

“Old what?”

The perfect lady, she would never use the word.

I stamped out of her dressing room, fixed to leave the house.

She left it to her tiresome, superfluous mother to explicate the curse that we both acknowledged but could not name. Old Mrs. Robichaux stopped me at the bottom of the stairs. Frail as she is, she’s strong. She drew me into the first sitting room and closed the double doors before she spoke. “You can’t go. Think of the children. Without you here to stand between Manette and your children, she…”

I never liked her, but she knew. I felt her out. “She what?”

She was beyond speech. I do not like the woman, but unlike her daughter, she is not false. For the first time in her long career here, old Mrs. Robichaux let me see her cry.

“Ma’am!”

“I don’t know what she’d do.”

My wife would what? I didn’t really know, but I knew the old woman was right. Too many unhappy years between us, hundreds of words hurled and returned, mulled and regurgitated, and Manette remains a mystery to me. Without me to see to it, she could take to her bed and leave our youngest to root in the

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.