Chesapeake Tide Read Online Free PDF

she snapped, angry that he’d brought up a sensitive subject. She abhorred weakness, more so in herself than in anyone around her.
    Cole bypassed her anger. “I want to talk about Libba and Chloe.”
    Nola Ruth looked at him and waited.
    â€œThere will be some adjusting to having a child in the house. It won’t be the same.”
    â€œI know that.”
    â€œWe’ve only had Libba,” her husband continued. “Kids are different today. Chloe is California born and raised. She’s not going to settle in right away. I don’t think anyone should mention staying here permanently.”
    â€œAre you censoring my speech, Coleson?”
    Coleson Delacourte looked at his wife, shriveled and broken, old before her time, but still beautiful. Nola would be beautiful if she lived to be a hundred. It was in her bones and in her eyes and in the lean, exotic length of her. She was first-lady material. He’d told her that long ago. It had pleased her. There was a time, long ago, when she had been easily pleased. Not anymore. “That’s exactly what I’m doing, Nola Ruth,” he said softly.
    She did not look away. “You never cared before,” she said. “Why now?”
    â€œYou’re wrong,” he said gently. “I cared a great deal.”
    Nola Ruth looked down and fidgeted with the fringe of her linen wrap. “I won’t say anything, not unless Libba brings it up first.”
    â€œThank you.”
    She hoped he’d go now that he’d said what he came for, but he didn’t.
    â€œDo you remember the first time I brought you home?”
    â€œWhy are you bringing that up now?” she asked, impatient, as usual, with his resurrecting the past.
    â€œYou were so young and so lovely.”
    â€œDo you have any idea how that makes me feel, now that I’m not?” she demanded.
    â€œEveryone ages, Nola Ruth,” he said patiently. “No need to be sensitive because you aren’t twenty-five anymore. You’re still the loveliest woman I’ve ever known.”
    â€œI’m not sensitive about my age, Coleson, or my looks. It’s my condition I find hard to tolerate.”
    â€œThe doctors say you’re doing well.”
    She didn’t look at him. “That’s encouraging. I wonder how they’d feel if they were in my place, unable to perform even the smallest act of independence.”
    Coleson Delacourte, a spare, fit man looking much younger than his years, shrugged his shoulders. “You’re one feisty woman, Nola Ruth.”
    She didn’t answer him. Cole was a good man, a philanthropist. The word no wasn’t in his vocabulary. Once, forty years ago, she’d loved that about him. When had it changed? When had the sensitivity she’d admired become weakness in her eyes? She couldn’t pinpoint a specific moment. Perhaps it happened gradually, when she was no longer grateful, when she realized that he was content to putter at the law, to take those cases that no one else would take, to set aside his fees more often than not, to allow their daughter, their only child, to attend the local public school and then, later, live at home and attend a state university when it was most important for her future to go elsewhere, when all the right people went elsewhere.
    Everything Cole did, he did in the name of principle and balancing the scales. He was a civil rights advocate well before it was politically correct, well before Thurgood Marshall and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka turned everything below the Mason-Dixon Line upside down. In his own way, he was a hero. Nola Ruth had heard him described in exactly those terms. She had no use for heroes. She wanted nothing to do with a martyr who sacrificed his family in the name of righteousness. Because of him Libba had left the Tidewater and gone where no self-respecting Southern woman would think of going, to Hollywood, and with an actor,