Blessings Read Online Free PDF Page B

screaming at their dirty children. But she had found light bulbs cheaper than the ones Nadine had found at the ShopRite, and paper towels, too, in a bargain twelve-pack. “Could you put that in my cart,” she had said to one of the stock boys, with no hint of a question in the sentence. In a locked drawer in her dresser Mrs.Blessing had a handmade leather case crammed with her mother’s old, ugly, and rather showy jewelry: diamonds as big as almonds set in a piecrust of sapphires or emeralds, ropes of pearls that dropped to the waist with jeweled clasps. She owned nearly twelve hundred acres of the best land in the northeastern part of the state. But she was cheap the way the rich are often cheap, about small things that do not last. “Thrifty,” she called it. “For pity’s sake, Mother,” said Meredith, who felt a faint throb each time she looked at the old watch on the ropy spotted wrist.
    The Cadillac had died in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. The engine rumbled disconsolately and then was silent, no matter how many times she turned the key. She had heard a peculiar sound from the car and suddenly realized that it was a man tapping on her window. He was thin and pale, his hair a kind of flat brown, tan really, all this way and that way over his forehead and his ears. He had small, closely set eyes and a big, wide, mobile mouth. There was a space between his front teeth. Alma, the cook at their house in the city, had once told the maids that this was a sign of licentiousness. “That’s a mark on a girl, and all the men can see it,” Alma had said, and she’d pushed her hips into the air, not knowing the little girl was lurking in the dim area just outside the pantry.
    Mrs. Blessing had held her handbag close as she looked at the man outside her car window.
    “You need a jump?” the young man had said loudly.
    “Pardon me?”
    “You need a jump? A jump? Do you—Sorry, do you want me to charge your battery from my battery? From my truck? It won’t take but a minute.”
    “What would be the charge for that?”
    He’d smiled then. It was a smile like Sunny’s, just this side of a grimace, as though it were a social gesture and his heart wasn’t in it. “Presentation!” Father had shouted at Sunny, hitting him between the shoulder blades. “Presence!”
    The car had started instantly after he had attached the cables from a dented pickup truck to the Cadillac. She’d had a moment’spanic when he’d pulled the jaws of the connectors from the two, afraid that the engine would sputter and stop again. Then she’d remembered herself and taken two dollars from her handbag and rolled down the window little more than an inch to slip them through.
    “Nobody’d charge you for that,” he’d said. “But you do need a tune-up. I don’t know who services your car, but they’re not taking good care of it.”
    She couldn’t say why, except that she thought he was too dim to be duplicitous, but she’d had him follow her home along the roads that left Mount Mason for the mountains.
    “What is your name?” she had said, seating him at the table in the kitchen as Nadine cleaned vegetables at the sink, making a good deal of noise, as though she were playing a concerto of disapproval written for colander, knives, pan lids, and faucet.
    “Skip,” he said. “Cuddy,” as though his last name were an afterthought.
    “Skip is not a name for a person. Skip is a dog’s name. Skippy. I knew a boy named Quad once.”
    “What?”
    “Quad.”
    “What?”
    “You deaf?” shouted Nadine.
    “Mind your own business,” Mrs. Blessing called over the noise from the sink.
    “I’m sorry, I thought you said Quad,” Skip had said, pushing his hair back and fidgeting in his chair.
    “I did. Quad Preston. Leland Preston the Fourth. Quad. Because of the Fourth. I refused to call him Quad. I don’t care for most nicknames. What is your real name?”
    He’d flushed, looked at his hands, which were cut and marked by the