A Wedding on the Banks Read Online Free PDF

saw you dragging them in today.” Vera was angrier than Goldie could ever remember. “You was so damned scared someone might see you, you let Popeye chew up your hoity-toity hat.”
    â€œ Someone has to feed him,” said Goldie. “That poor dog looks like a washboard walking around on four legs.”
    â€œHe gets plenty to eat,” shouted Vera, who rarely knew where Popeye was, let alone if he was nutritionally satisfied.
    â€œHell he does,” said Goldie. “He lays in the yard all day eating the catalog. Even the kids joke about it. They say he’s too weak to order anything.”
    It was Pike, who had fallen asleep on the sofa during The Edge of Night, who came to Goldie’s rescue. He ordered Vera to go back down the hill and forget about the incident.
    â€œLick some Green Stamps and paste ’em in a book,” Pike suggested to his brother’s wife. “Git your mind off this foolishness.” So Vera had loosened her grip on the door and retreated.
    â€œShe’s so mad she’s melting all the snow off the hill,” Goldie had observed to Pike, and then had gone back to packing away the boxes of Christmas lights, some to be used the very next holiday, others during the many holidays to come, when the very mountain top of Giffordtown would radiate for miles around.
    For two weeks following the sale, Vera had made everyone in her own household miserable—all except Popeye, who was forced daily to eat bowls of chopped welfare Spam, mixed with powdered welfare eggs. The dining took place outside, and the sole purpose was to assure Goldie that his daily diet was a well-balanced, family-monitored affair. Popeye was delighted and, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, added stomach weight so quickly that the entire length of his body turned round and wobbly.
    â€œNow he looks like a big ball of yarn walking around on four toothpicks,” Goldie said, lifting a curtain panel with one finger ever so slightly and watching the activity at the bottom of the hill.
    Pike Gifford was flattened out on the sofa, waiting for Guiding Light. Like kings, the male Giffords never worked, and they engaged with the public at special functions only, the kings at court, the Giffords in court.
    â€œShe ought to be mixing up a little meat for her kids,” Pike had yawned. “It might stop that little one’s nose from bleeding all the time. It looks like somebody stuck a pig in that house.”
    While the snows fell and the land settled more serenely under the tonnage of winter, the battle between the two women became military. Encastled on the top of the hill with her small army, Goldie had in her coffers a treasure wanted by the angry army camped at the base of the hill. They waited. They spied. Since party lines still plagued Mattagash in 1969, McKinnon and Gifford alike, they listened in on each other’s calls. Each and every time, after hearing the one long, two short rings, Goldie would carefully lift the receiver.
    â€œThe blond witch is on the line, Maggie,” Vera would warn. “Be careful what you say.” And many times Goldie had to bite her tongue in order not to ask, “Who’re you calling a witch, you gray-haired hag?” Instead she would wait her turn, wait until someone phoned her, knowing Vera would hear the two long, two short rings and be unable to resist a listen.
    â€œThe biggest mistake Vinal Gifford ever made just picked up the phone, Lizzie,” Goldie would say. “Don’t breathe deep. You might catch stupidity.”
    Vera and Goldie also waged their ornamental battle through the children. “They’re as bad as the Viet Cong,” Vinal commented to Pike one day, as the brothers sat before the final minutes of Days of Our Lives . “The next thing you know, they’ll be strapping grenades on them kids and sending ’em back and forth across the road.” But, quick to vie for parental