(2008) Down Where My Love Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

smeared on Amos's hands and shirt. He brushed himself off, making it worse, paused, and then looked right at me.
    "D.S., here I am. My uniform is now covered in pig crap, and I've got a radio, loaded gun, big stick, and this badge. If I could trade places with you, I would. But since I can't, I'm here to ask you, please go inside, shower twice, shave, and get dressed. Because deep down, you know it's best for you." He scanned the cornfield. "It's best for your wife, and it's best for this place."
    Sometimes I wished Amos weren't so honest.
    "Who's staying with her?" I asked.
    "I was until a little bit ago. The nurse is now. She's a sweet girl. Pastor's daughter. She'll take good care of her. D.S., there's nothing you can do for Maggie. That's God's deal. I don't understand it and I don't like it, but there is nothing you or I can do for her. Right now what we need to worry about is you and making sure that the mailbox out front goes right on saying `Styles.'

    "And for that to happen, you got to teach. This is what it comes down to. And don't give me any of that stuff about not teaching again." Amos pointed his finger at me and poked me in the chest. "You are a teacher. Why do you think God gave you Nanny to begin with? You think that was just some big cosmic mistake?" He spat again. "You think she just shared all that with you so you could keep it bottled up and to your lonesome?"
    Amos put one foot up on the steps and rested his elbow on his knee. "Not likely. You may like farming, but you're no Papa, at least not yet. You can hide out here if you want to, but it'd be a sorry shame. Now are you gonna get cleaned up, or do I have to hose you down myself?"
    I opened the screen door and stumbled into the house, mumbling, "Dang you, Amos ... "
    "Hey, I'm just honoring my promise to your wife. You married her. Not me. If you want to complain"-Amos pointed toward the hospital-"complain to her."
    "I would if I could get there."
    "After your little chat with Mr. Winter." Amos smiled, grumbled something else to himself, and then walked to the kitchen and began washing out the percolator.

    I SUPPOSE YOU COULD CALL ME A LATE-LIFE MIRACLE. At least I'm told my parents thought so, because my dad was forty-two and my mom forty when she gave birth to me. I have sweet memories, but not many because Dad died in a car accident pretty close to my fifth birthday and Mom suffered a stroke strolling down the cereal aisle of the grocery store six months later.
    My grandparents took me in after their daughter's funeral and raised me until I turned eighteen and headed off to college. Despite the absence of my parents, love lived in our house. Papa and Nanny saw to that. They poured their love into three things: each other, me, and this house.

    When my grandfather built our two-bedroom brick farmhouse more than sixty years ago, he pieced the floors out of twelve-inch-wide magnolia planks and dovetailed them together without using nails. They were strong, creaky, marred with an occasional deep groove, and in the den where my grandparents danced in their socks to the big band music of Lawrence Welk, polished to a mirror shine.
    Papa covered the walls in eight-inch cypress plank, the ceilings in four-inch tongue-and-groove oak, and the roof in corrugated tin. I have no memory of the house ever being any other color but white with green trim and shutters. Why? Because that's the way Nanny liked it, and Papa never objected.
    One summer, standing on a ladder and painting the underside of a soffit for the umpteenth time, he looked down and said with a smile, "Never argue with a woman about her house. Remember that. It's hers, not yours." He waved his paintbrush toward the kitchen and whispered, "I may have built it, but in truth, we're just lucky she lets us sleep here."
    Whenever I think of Nanny's home, I remember it glistening white and green under a fresh coat of springtime paint, landscaped with whatever was blooming, and cool from the whispering