Call Me Zelda Read Online Free PDF Page B

charge today,” he said, rolling up his window. “I won at cards last night, and I said to myself, ‘If I win, I’m not chargin’ Anna.’”
    I laughed, and opened the door to shove the money down the back of his shirt.
    “Don’t get fresh with me, young missy,” he called. “I’ll tell the wife.”
    Lincoln talked only about baseball and his wife, the former being his greatest love. Time for him was marked by the passage from preseason, to season, to postseason. He was fond of telling me he bled black and orange for his beloved Baltimore Black Sox, and that his favorite player, Jud “Boojum” Wilson, would have been good enough to play against any of those major leaguers, if only colored men were allowed.
    Lincoln and I had a standing date once a month. On every third Saturday morning he delivered me to my parents’ place in the rural part of Towson just outside the Baltimore suburbs, argued with me about paying before he drove away, and returned Sunday evening to take me back to the city.
    I closed his laugh into the car and started up the drive.
    Though it was the end of February, the day was a lazy sort of cold. The sun slipped through the clouds in bursts, reminding the landscape that it was still there, prodding snow piles to relax into puddles and stirring sleeping seeds under the ground.
    My breath always caught when I looked at my parents’ house. It was a brown ranch style nestled among poplars and pines, with shiny green holly lining its front porch lattice in the winter and deep blue hydrangeas in the summer. It was equal parts comfort and affliction for me. It held so many happy memories and my parents, whom I adored, but it also reminded me of the daughter I’d lost, and the time we lived here after the war.
    I saw my mother in the window smiling out at me, and the tension left my shoulders. When I opened the unlocked door, the aroma of coffee and banana bread greeted me first, followed by my mother, limping around the corner, clutching her cane.
    “Please stay seated,” I said. “I saw you there.”
    “Let me get up to greet you while I still can,” she said.
    At fifty-nine, my mother still held the beauty of her youth, with only a peppering of gray hair at her temples and the faintestlines around her eyes. She wore her brown hair in a loose bun at the base of her neck. Her warm brown eyes had a glint of mischief, and she still dressed every day for visitors, though she and my dad didn’t often have them. Her body, however, had betrayed her, as she often said. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around the time I began working at the Phipps Clinic, five years ago. I embraced her and she allowed me to walk her back over and lower her into her chair. I took the seat across from her.
    “Are you losing weight?” I asked, worried by the prominence of her bones I could feel through her sweater.
    “Now, don’t start fussing over me as soon as you’ve walked in the door,” she said. “Tell me about your month.”
    I’d been waiting for this query with great anticipation for weeks. I usually had nothing of any importance to report. I’d say so and watch my mother’s face fall from a mixture of boredom that I had no news and worry that I was not embracing life—points that, I reflected, she had a right to worry about.
    But not this month.
    Dr. Meyer did not want us to speak about our patients outside of the clinic, but I rationalized my guilt away by telling myself my mother needed stimulation and I needed advice. My eyes flickered over her bookshelf, bursting with well-worn spines, and immediately found the object of my glance. This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned winked at me from their positions, causing me to smile.
    “You have news,” she said with genuine pleasure. “Tell me!”
    “Maybe I’ll make you guess,” I said, raising an eyebrow and enjoying her anticipation.
    “You’ve found a man!” she said.
    What she blurted out so completely surprised and