Chance of a Lifetime Read Online Free PDF

fur to the game.
    “If a drunk driver hadn’t ended it all, I think Mom would be at your mother’s side now.”
    “Probably so.” Tannon didn’t sound convinced.
    Silently they walked into the nursing home. Tannon held the door for her and they slipped into his mother’s room.
    The room was lovely, done in pale yellow with flowers on every table, but the sight of Mrs. Parker, curled in the fetal position, broke Emily’s heart. She’d withered to frail, and her black hair was snow white. She held a pillow against her as if it were all she had in the world to hang on to.
    “Mother,” Tannon said as he moved to her side. “Mother? Can you hear me?”
    Paulette Parker didn’t open her eyes.
    Tannon knelt beside the bed and lightly touched her arm. “Mother. I’ve brought someone to see you. Do you remember Shelley Tomlinson’s daughter?”
    Emily stood just behind him having no idea what to do. Paulette had been her idea of a perfect lady when she’d been a child. She was always laughing, always the center of attention and drew people to her everywhere she went. She had suits to wear to church with hats and gloves to match. She even owned fur coats, which she wore when her husband took her to plays in New York City. The Parkers weren’t any richer than the Tomlinsons, but they seemed to be with Paulette’s little touches around the house and her wild stories of their ordinary vacations.
    Tannon looked back at Emily. “She’s not asleep. She’s just closing us out of her world. She does that when she doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”
    Emily knelt beside the bed and whispered to the shell of a woman who’d defined class to a small shy child. “Paulette, it’s nice to see you. I was just thinking of how you once taught me how to set the table for high tea. You even had a cover for the teapot you said came all the way from England.”
    Gray eyes slowly opened. “It did, Shelley, you know it did.”
    Emily smiled. “Yes, I knew because you always reminded me.”
    Paulette’s thin lips pulled to a smile. “We did have a laugh about that, didn’t we? I never told Ted that it was sent to me by an exchange student we met at the state fair in Dallas. He would have had a fit. I wrote the fellow all through our senior year, and when he said he was sending me a surprise, you and I spent hours trying to guess what it was. A teapot cozy wasn’t even on the list.”
    Emily grinned. “I’d forgotten that.” Her mother had died during Emily’s junior year in college with what seemed a million things left unsaid between them. She’d never known that her mother even went to a state fair. It seemed far too wild a thing for Shelley Tomlinson to do. After all, she played the piano in church and married before she was twenty. “Do you remember what you and Shelley did at the fair, Paulette?”
    “Of course.” Tannon’s mother straightened, shifting onto her pillow as she tugged up her covers. “We told our parents we had to stay a day longer at the state FHA convention, but we went to the fair. You ate so much fried food you got sick. While we were sitting in the shade, waiting for you to recover, we met these two boys from England. I swear they looked like they could have been the Beatles’ brothers. Or at least the one who liked me could have. Yours was red-headed and had a habit of making fun of the way everyone talked, like we were the ones talking funny and not him. Remember how bored we got with him?”
    Tannon offered Emily a chair as his mother told a story Emily felt sure no one in either family had ever heard. Paulette swore she fell madly in love with her date for the day, but Shelley had her feet firmly planted on the ground as always and wouldn’t give the redheaded Englishman a second glance.
    “We ran the park like wild children, sneaking into places and eating food we’d never tried. Just before it got dark, wewalked along the back of the fair grounds where people were camped out like