Cottonwood Whispers Read Online Free PDF Page A

but the thought of Gemma sitting in Joel Hadley’s backseat pushed my worries about Luke aside.
    When he caught sight of me and my sour face, he must’ve known right off there was trouble. “You look snakebit, Jessilyn. What’s wrong?”
    “Gemma! You know she got picked up in a fancy automobile by Joel Hadley?”
    “Joel Hadley? What in the world for?”
    “He says he was drivin’ by and stopped to give her a ride to save her the walk to his house.”
    Luke leaned his back against the porch rail and frowned. “Ain’t no way a Hadley would go givin’ rides to colored girls.”
    “That’s just what I said.”
    “What’d your daddy say about that?”
    “He ain’t home. Nobody’s home but me.”
    Luke looked off down the road like he could see Joel and Gemma even though they were out of sight. “I don’t like it. Somethin’ ain’t right about that.”
    “I’m glad to hear I ain’t the only one seein’ sense.” I crossed my arms. “You know what I’m goin’ to do? I’m goin’ to ring them up in a few minutes and make sure Gemma got there; that’s what I’m goin’ to do.”
    “That’s a fine idea, Jessie. We ought to check up on her.” He sat down in the porch swing and chomped a piece of tall grass. “I don’t like that Joel Hadley. He ain’t to be trusted, so I see it.”
    Now that I had some peace about Gemma, my butterflies from last night woke up and started flying around their home in the pit of my stomach. I sat gingerly next to Luke, leaving plenty of space between us. “You see? It’s no wonder we’re friends, seein’ as how we look at things the same way most times.”
    Luke tapped me on my nose. “There you go, Jessie. We’ve got somethin’ special, you and me.”
    My heart started racing, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Gemma at all anymore. “You think we got somethin’ special?” I asked wonderingly.
    He looked away quickly, clearing his throat like he wished he could swallow those words back up. “Well, Jessie . . . whatI mean is . . . seems to me I remember savin’ your life in the swimmin’ hole first day we met.”
    “I remember.”
    “So the way I figure it, when a man saves a girl’s life . . . well then, they got a special kinship, like. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change that.”
    There was that word girl again. It seemed these days I could go from girl to woman and back to girl again faster than I could blink. We sat there for a minute before I ventured to speak. “Luke?”
    “Hmm?”
    “You sayin’ we’ll be together forever?”
    “Well . . .” He gave the porch rail a shove with his feet and set us swinging. “That depends. Who’s to say you won’t fall in love with some passerby, and he’ll marry you and take you off—”
    “I ain’t marryin’ no passerby,” I spluttered, figuring Luke Talley ought to know by now that I was marrying him someday.
    “All right,” he said with a chuckle. “Don’t go gettin’ your dander up. I was just sayin’ . . .”
    “Well, don’t say it. I ain’t leavin’ to marry some stranger.”
    “Yes ma’am!” My familiar temper was a balm for our discomfort, and Luke’s mask of indifference slipped off his face just a bit. “That suits me just fine, Jessilyn. I ain’t gonna complain one bit about you stickin’ around.”
    I looked away from him so he wouldn’t see me trying notto smile and sat there in silence for some minutes, wallowing in the joy of his words. He’d been through enough with my family in the past four years to become like one of our own, and I meant to make it official before I turned twenty-one. I already had it all planned out. All I needed now was to convince Luke and my daddy of the same thing. I was mulling over names for our first child when I remembered my promise to phone the Hadleys’, and I hopped up quickly, setting the swing to wobbling. “Gotta call Gemma,” I called over my shoulder on the way inside.
    “Gemma Teague?” the woman on the other