The Testament of Harold's Wife by Lynne Hugo

Author:Lynne Hugo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

22

I’ll give him credit for this much: Al did not beat it back to his own place and call Gary before the highway dust had settled. He must have slept on it because it was a full twenty-four hours before Gary got wind of my plan (a wind that could only have blown out of Al’s mouth), and bounced his rattletrap van down the ruts in my driveway so fast and hard, I’m surprised his head didn’t go right through the top.

I didn’t get what was going on at first, which scared me again about my mind, which I cannot afford to lose. But he showed up with a strawberry cheese danish from Diana Dee’s Bakery over in Germantown—a particular weakness of mine—instead of some new atrocity like the bumper sticker he put on my car last week. GOT JESUS? it said, next to a picture of a glass of milk. I had to work with a pan of hot water and a razor blade to get it off after he left. The danish made him a son I could relate to again, like when he was married to Nicole, and the notion was so lovely it threw me off my game. In those few moments, he reminded me of Harold.

“Good coffee, Mom,” he even said before he showed his hand. “Hey, cat, get off the table. Great weather we’ve been having. I guess Al must be about ready to put the corn in, huh?”

“That he is. Ground’s dry enough now.”

“So are you doing okay money-wise? I mean I know you didn’t get the crop harvested after Dad died, and . . .” He trailed off, waiting for me to pick up the piece of yarn he was trailing and knit it into some information for him. Only I didn’t. I hate knitting.

I took a drink of my coffee, which was still almost as hot as I like it. The light in the room was quietly full, clear, unyielding—not the kind to make you blink—but direct and true, unwilling to soften small flaws of my housekeeping. A couple of random crumbs on the counter, whitish dried droplets of water on the window above the kitchen sink, a smeary sponge line where I’d wiped the kitchen table, a small spiderweb I can’t reach up in the corner next to the dish cupboard. In the same way, I could see the lines on my son’s face. The angry parentheses around his mouth from the arguments he won with Nicole, and the war he lost when she left, how it surprised and nearly killed him and he didn’t know it and might never. The grey-brown hollows under his eyes that must be the dried pools of Cody grief. I saw where he’d missed two spots when he shaved that morning, and how the collar of his tan shirt was slightly frayed. These scars of grief and failure put me in mind of my Harold, and I started to move my hand across the table to put it over his.

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.