Blessings Read Online Free PDF

Except for that groundhog out by the asparagus patch. I need to speak to him about that.”
    Of course if Mrs. Blessing had known in the Wal-Mart lot that the young man was recently released from prison, as Nadine so vehemently insisted, she would have rolled up her window and gone on her way alone. But she was not about to back down now. Lydia Blessing did what she wanted: that was something upon which she had prided herself. Once she moved to Blessings for good she told it to herself and to others over and over again, so that after a time it was said to be true: Lydia Blessing does what she wants. One of Foster’s nephews had set himself up in the apartment over the garage, as though it were his sinecure, the third generation of his family to do so, and two weeks later she had noticed from inside the sleeping porch that the garbage cans had been left at the roadside for a full day after the truck had come. She had even used the binoculars next to her bed to make certain that she was not being precipitous. Then she’d fired the man, and hired another, the man who plowed the driveway in winter. His coffee had been vile, and in his second month on the job he had left the door to the basement ajar, and a soiled work glove on the kitchen counter. She had looked at it for a long time, remembering when the grounds staff never went farther into the kitchen than the pantry, the kitchen staff never farther into the house than the dining room. There had been a succession of unsatisfactory men. It had never occurred to her that she was demanding.
    There was something furtive about this new one in the last few days, but he worked hard, never cut corners, never complained. From time to time she would see him disappear into the garage, but she also saw him hosing off the boat just after dawn as she watched the pond and the fields and the faraway road with her binoculars. He seemed to work odd hours now, but there were no weeds around her tree peonies, and the bachelor buttons had been properly pinched, so that they were spreading a constellation ofblue beneath the window of the small office where she attended to her correspondence on stationery stacked in boxes ten deep inside the storage closet, stationery that would surely survive her.
    It was just luck that she had found him at the Wal-Mart. That morning she had told Nadine that the household expenses were exorbitant, that Nadine paid too much for paper towels and dishwashing detergent and light bulbs, that she was profligate with money that was not hers. Mrs. Blessing had put on her old driving jacket, the plaid one from the place Father liked so much in London, the one near Regent Street with all the guns and walking sticks, and walked slowly, her back straight, her head high, to the garage. The odor of mothballs and bath powder hung like a miasma in the still summer air of the car. The Cadillac had been dusty. It had been three weeks since she had taken it out, to go to the club for a drink with her lawyer. And she was between caretakers. The last one had brought a woman into the apartment one night and been fired by the end of the week. It paid to know what the staff was up to. Her mother had always said that.
    Mount Mason had seemed dusty, too, dusty and out-of-date, aging the way that the cheap houses around the industrial park did, peeling, cracked, disintegrating instead of mellowing. So many of her landmarks had gone, the old limestone bank building chopped up into a travel agency, a beauty parlor, and a used-book store; the boxy red brick hardware store refaced with some horrid imitation stone and made over into a place that sold records. She had had to drive around the circle in the center of town twice, unsure of which way to turn for the commercial strip, and a car full of teenagers had honked at her and driven far too close to her back bumper. And then there had been the horrid noisy glare of the store, and the insistence of the other shoppers on pushing past her and