This Place of Wonder: A Novel by Barbara O'Neal

Author:Barbara O'Neal [O'Neal, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2022-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Norah

It’s hot when I leave Trudy, the sun a high burning ball that makes the sidewalks sizzle, and even flies are too tired to do more than buzz up lethargically when I pass. I long for the pool at Belle l’Été, for my cozy room under the oleander bushes, but of course I can’t go back there right now. I have to find refuge. I head for the library. It’s air-conditioned and no one will hurry me.

And books are always a source of comfort. Bookstore, library, even a bookmobile, I’m happy.

One of the great pieces of luck in my life was landing in a foster home filled with books when I was seven. I mean, overflowing with books. They were stacked on shelves, as books are meant to be, or so I learned, in the living room and in the bedrooms, and stacked on a shelf by the stairs that led to the basement. In the kitchen, cookbooks lined the top of the fridge, a place I’d only ever seen boxes of cereal, and filled up one whole counter.

It wasn’t the nicest house in the world. It smelled of dogs and the cigarettes my foster mom Susan smoked, and she loved reading so much she didn’t spend all that much time cleaning, although the army of children she cared for did a lot of it. We had chores, ordinary kinds of chores, like teaming up to do the dishes after meals, and taking turns vacuuming and cleaning bathrooms and watering the garden, not like some places I lived later, where kids were treated like slaves.

Susan and Joseph were good foster parents. I lived there for almost six years, from age seven until I was thirteen, and in that time we ranged between five and seven kids, three who were born to the family, the rest fosters Susan took in because she’d been orphaned at nine and hated it. She loved kids, and cooking and growing vegetables, but mostly she loved reading. Reading while she stood at the counter, smoking and waiting for water to boil for spaghetti. Reading in her chair after dinner while everyone else watched TV on a console in the living room. Reading in the bathtub and reading in bed. She read a bit of everything, from mysteries to biographies and everything in between, but her true love was romances of every variety, the subscription books that arrived every month and the fat paperbacks she picked up at the used bookstore for a quarter or a dollar each.

She took us to the library once a month, the whole gang, whoever was living there at the time, and let us check out whatever we wanted. No limits on how many or what subject—well, one time Billy Orly wanted to check out a book on a true-crime murder, and she didn’t let him have it, and I’m just as glad; we all were.

Not everyone loved it as much as me. Sometimes, kids would just slump in the shared areas and give irritated looks at the rest of us.

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