Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle

Author:Jill McCorkle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1987-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

PART 4

VIRGINIA’S HOURS are all confused; when it’s dark and still, she is wide awake, tossing, turning; and when daylight appears in Gram’s window, she is too tired to open her eyes. The days seem to bleed and run, meals and game shows, cramps and weather reports and tick after tick of the clock. It is morning, Thursday morning, but when she tries to put the days in order, when Mark came, when he called, it seems like one long day with bright hot light through the window and no rain.

She concentrates on the ticking, the clock, so out of place in the duplex. It used to be in the wide hallway of the house on Carver Street, there by the stairs on the pine floors that Gram painted brown every other spring. Gram would hide presents and snacks on top of the clock where Virginia and Robert couldn’t reach them.

“If that clock ever stops,” Cindy had told her once, Virginia only six, “Aunt Emily will die just like on ‘The Twilight Zone.’”

“No.” Virginia shook her head. “Stop it!”

“What honey?” Esther peeks around the corner from the kitchen and Virginia shakes her head. “You’re starting to act like her,” Esther says and points to Gram who is dozing in the Lazy Boy.

“It’s just a TV show,” her brother, Robert, had told her after Cindy left and he found her sitting there in front of the clock, watching the pendulum, thinking if it started to slow down that she would very quickly turn the little key, open that glass door and push it back and forth, back and forth until someone came to fix it. Robert had sat beside her, his long legs tan and skinny, the Saxapaw Junior Baseball jersey that it seems he wore for years. “I mean it Ginny Sue,” he said, those clear brown eyes squinting with his smile. “You’ve got to learn to fight back. I’m not always gonna be around to take up for you.”

“I know.” She nodded but it seemed that he would always be there; it seemed that they would always eat Sunday dinner with Gram in the house on Carver Street. It seemed she would always be able to run into his room if she got scared at night, that they would always race to see who could get to the bathroom first when they got up in the mornings. They would always sit in those same chairs at the kitchen table and read the backs of the cereal boxes while their mother packed school lunches. They would sit on his bed those rare nights it snowed, the drapes pulled back so they could see by the streetlight while the flakes got bigger and bigger, the yard finally covered in a film of white. “No school tomorrow,” he’d say, hope in his voice. And they would get up the next morning, tired from no sleep but urged by the slight flakes still falling. She would sit with her knees pulled up under

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.