A Secret Identity Read Online Free PDF Page B

the door to find her and Pop cuddled in the middle of their huge bed, her gray head resting on the grizzled gray hair of his bare chest.
    “Oh,” I said, blushing. “I’m sorry!” I started to close the door.
    “No, no, Cara,” Pop called. “Don’t go.”
    I hesitated, feeling I was intruding, knowing I was intruding.
    “I called for you to come in, Cara, love,” Mom said, “because I want you to know that love, true love, doesn’t die with the years. Gray doesn’t mean gone.” And she rested her hand on Pop’s chest. He grinned at me like a young man.
    I shook my head in false disdain. “You two are such a bad example to an innocent young woman like me.”
    “She needs more proof, Tess,” Pop said. And he bent over and kissed Mom a great smacker.
    “I love you guys so much,” I whispered as I closed the door. All day I couldn’t stop smiling.
    Now I started crying, and the tears spilled over and ran down my cheeks in a rain of loss.
    God, how can I survive this aloneness?
    The thought brought an intense, thrumming anxiety. My heart began to pound and my hands shook as I clasped them to my chest.
    Always before I’d been alone by choice, alone yet surrounded by people I loved and who loved me. Now I was alone, period.
    I was almost in a panic as I ran to the linen closet and pulled out a new box of tissues. I tore it open, grabbed a fistful, and began mopping my face, but the tears kept coming. I returned to the living room with the tissue box under my arm, Rainbow padding behind me. I sank to the floor and, knees pulled to my chest, laid my head on them. I sobbed and sobbed.
    A tentative paw patted my thigh and Rainbow whimpered. I reached out and swept her into my lap. For once, she stayed. “Oh, Baby, what are we going to do?”
    She had no answer, but she lay still, letting me stroke her and bury my face in her fur. Finally though, she could bear it no longer, and she hopped down. She stalked under Mom’s dropleaf table and began rubbing her head against the box Mom always kept tucked under there.
    “So I can enjoy these things anytime I want,” she’d say as she reached down and pulled out the generations of photos lying there.
    I crawled to the box and tugged it from its hiding place. It suddenly became my life preserver. I could do better than go to dinner with Pop and Mom tonight. I could live our lives together all over again.
    The first picture I pulled out was a very old sepia photo of Pop’s parents, the first John Seward Bentley and his wife, Charlotte, seated in a stiff, formal pose from the early twentieth century. In great contrast, the next photo I pulled out was an informal picture from Ward and Marnie’s wedding five years ago. The sun was shining, the warm June breeze was blowing Marnie’s veil out behind her, and everyone was smiling. Mom, three months short of beginning her final, fatal struggle, wore a midnight-blue that looked stunning with her white hair. Pop’s great chest strained his starched shirt and tux. Marnie was radiant and Ward handsome, though they looked impossibly young.
    Even I looked good in the rose gown Marnie made me wear instead of the beige I’d wanted. Marnie had also insisted I “do something with that hair!” The result was an elegant chignon at the base of my neck softened by curls about my face instead of the usual ponytail. The baby’s breath and roses tucked in my hair made me look alive in a way my usual slicked-back style never did.
    I smiled through the mists blurring my vision.
    For two hours I cried as I looked at black-and-white photos of Pop in his World II Army uniform, of Mom, her hair dark, her smile brilliant, holding the young Trey (John Seward Bentley III, my father), of my great-grandparents standing in the front yard of this very house when it was brand-new, the trees and shrubs so small and unformed.
    I found a picture of Ward and me standing with Mickey Mouse on that long-ago vacation. Ward was so happy he almost vibrated