Angels All Over Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

it—John and his little friend, just like old times. Did you run out of the house?”
    “No. I stayed until the next afternoon. Even then I didn’t know anything. It was just a terrible feeling I had. Plus the way Jemmie kept looking at me—as if she had already shut me out.”
    “Strange. I always thought you and John’s mother were fond of each other.”
    “So did I.” I felt like crying again. I wouldn’t tell Margo the worst part: when John had visited me the next week, I had screamed and screamed at him, accusing him of every sort of betrayal. He had calmly denied each accusation except one. At the end of my tirade, when I had worked up enough adrenaline and momentum to screech something about his unnatural fascination with his mother, John was silent. He turned bright red and said nothing at all.
    “No wonder you’re under the weather,” Margo said, taking my hand. “You’ve got to let me tell Lily about this.”
    “Of course tell Lily. I’d have told her myself if the Wild One weren’t here.”
    “Hey, what happened to your toast?”
    We listened. From the next room, which was Lily’s, we could hear moans.
    “Oh, Jesus,” Margo said. “Are you hungry? I can get the toast.”
    “Actually I am.”
    I wondered what my father thought about John. He hated to see his daughters hurt. All our lives he had called us his “Good Girls.” Once he had walked down the beach and come across me and Lily standing on the high-tide line beside a couple of boys, who were sitting. One of the boys was notorious for having been expelled from boarding school for possessing beer. My father walked straight up to him, wagged his long finger in the boy’s face, and hissed, “You stay away from my Good Girls.”
    On waking from my two-day sleep, in spite of what I had told Lily and Margo, I felt less convinced of my father’s presence among us. But in case he
could
know my thoughts, I tried to think some good ones about John. Why had I loved a man who was snobby about restaurants and in love with his own mother? Because we both loved libraries and would spend many free days together wandering through them, taking books off the shelves and reading them at those wide, polished wood tables with the immovable green shaded lamps. I had never before met a man who shared my passion for libraries. Because he kept a small black-and-white television in his austere classical office so that he could lock his door and watch me on
Beyond the Bridge
every day between two and three. Because he would pass up big parties because I hated them. Because he had comforted me before and after my father had died. And because, for one year, from one spring till the next, he had given me all the love I had thought I wanted.

Chapter 2
    W hen I first felt better after what Lily and Margaret had come to call “The Awakening,” I took a book to read on one of the docks. The day was clear and fine, a brilliant day with a stiff offshore breeze. Beneath my long white pants and billowy shirt, I was covered with sunscreen. I wore sunglasses and a wide-brimmed straw hat, tied on with a blue silk scarf. Perhaps I looked like a reclusive movie star, but my purpose was more urgent: cancer runs in the Cavan family, especially in the fair among us, the ones who freckle easily. And I have red hair.
    “Delilah, can I have your autograph?” asked one girl in a group of high school girls clustered around The Yard’s entrance. They moved nervously while I signed the covers of their paperback books with someone’s eyeliner: no one had paper or pen. Why did that act have the strange effect of lifting my spirits so high? Because it told me I was loved. It didn’t matter that the man I had loved was perverse, that I had twice seen my father’s ghost, that I believed the Cavan women had the power of witches. Nice high school girls liked me, and that counted.
    “Una!” I turned to see Boom-Boom hurrying toward me from
Manaloa
. Instantly I resolved to call him