The Lost Husband by Katherine Center

Author:Katherine Center [Center, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780345538918
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-05-06T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

With O’Connor gone, possibly never to return, Jean wound up hiring Sunshine to help out in the mornings. Jean wouldn’t say that O’Connor had quit, exactly, only that he had “other priorities” at the moment.

I was ecstatic to see Sunshine arrive—on April Fool’s Day, in fact, which was perfect because she was absolutely terrible at everything I asked her to do. She was the Amelia Bedelia of farm help, but by then I had been doing everything by myself long enough that even that was better than nothing.

She was pleasant to talk to, if a little odd-looking in her black combat boots and black lipstick. It was a wonder she didn’t frighten the goats. The only thing that wasn’t black on Sunshine, actually, was the roots of her hair. The ends were still dark as obsidian, but the longer she went without dyeing it again, the clearer it was that the roots were a perky, cheerful blond.

“Are you growing out your hair?” I asked one day in the barn.

“Nah,” she said. “I’m just going two-tone.”

“But those blond roots,” I said. “Is that your real color?”

Sunshine raised an eyebrow. “No blonde jokes,” she said.

I wanted to ask her why on earth she would cover up that golden hair with dye, but I never did. She had her reasons. I wanted very much to ask her about her former famous life, but I just couldn’t. If she wanted to avoid the life itself, she probably wanted to avoid the topic, too. Instead we just talked about little local happenings, as if neither of our lives had ever been any different. The weather. The vintage Ford Fairlane that Russ was rebuilding out in their garage. The progress Jean and the kids were making on the tree house—which now had a rope net for climbing, a roof made out of flattened tin cans, and, down low, a pirate’s plank.

Also, of course, we talked about the goats. Whose lives turned out to be almost as compelling as our own—to Sunshine, at least. Laura Ingalls Wilder, for example, had eaten Jean’s favorite rose bush, and Mother Teresa was pregnant again. Helen Keller had gotten stuck in the mud down at the pond and had to be rescued, a process that took an hour. And Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, and Oprah Winfrey had formed a little clique of late and would not give the other goats the time of day.

Sunshine couldn’t get over the way those three isolated themselves under the bois d’arc tree. “What do you think they’re talking about?” she kept asking as she glanced over.

“They’re not talking, Sunshine,” I said. “They’re goats.”

“They’ve got some kind of secret,” Sunshine insisted. “Look at how they’re huddled.”

“You do know they can’t talk, right?”

“I know they can’t talk in a way you and I can understand,” Sunshine said, taking all my condescension and lobbing it right back.

I ceded the point.

But I did like it when she was there. The rest of the day, it was mostly just me doing chores alone.

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