Delia’s Gift Read Online Free PDF

during my pregnancy, Mrs. Newell,” I said quickly.
    She pulled her shoulders back and pursed her lips for a moment. “Well, I don’t imagine you intended to be pregnant, now, did you, dear?” she said, blinking her smile.
    I looked away.
    “I’m sorry, but I’m just giving you my best professional advice. What you do and don’t do is your own business, Delia.”
    “Good,” I said.
    “After you give birth, that is. Until then, it is both our businesses.”
    She waited for my response, but I said nothing.
    “Enjoy your lunch.”
    I looked at the salad, the salmon, and the slice of whole-grain bread. There was a plate of strawberries and some walnuts for dessert.
    “I could have just as easily gone down to the dining room for this,” I said.
    “Mr. Bovio wanted it brought to you.”
    “Why? Isn’t it better for me to walk?”
    “I’m not saying you shouldn’t walk. Of course, you should walk. I’m simply following Mr. Bovio’s orders. You’re my patient, but he’s employed me,” she replied, and finally left. I felt as if a weight had been lifted from my chest.
    I ate and thought that the food, although adequate, was basically tasteless. Mrs. Newell was more of a nurse than a cook, I decided. I felt sorry for all the well-to-do married and pregnant women for whom she had served. Like me, they were probably happy to get her out of their homes and get back to eating what they wanted.
    I pushed the bedside table aside and sprawled on the love seat in the adjoining sitting room. I was emotionally exhausted and just wanted to calm myself and relax. I know I dozed off for a while, because when I opened my eyes again, my tray was gone. I closed them again.
    For a few moments, I tried to forgot all that had happened to me since my parents were killed in the truck accident in Mexico. With my eyes closed, I could pretend I was in my and Abuela Anabela’s bedroom back in our little village. Before our family tragedy, I had been a happy young girl who never thought of herself as poor and unfortunate. We had worked hard for the little we had, but we had found ways to be grateful and happy. Nevertheless, I would never deny that I didn’t fantasize about living in a palace and having servants and a beautiful bedroom just like the one I was in now. I would imagine that my and Abuela Anabela’s little room with its concrete floor was suddenly magically quite different.
    There were beautiful velvet curtains over the windows just as there were here. There was a carpet that also seemed like a floor of marshmallows, and my bed was just as big, with pillows as fluffy, and with a canopy and four posters. I had pretended I had a magic wand and could wave it over the old mismatched furniture, the crates and boxes we used for dressers and drawers, the clothes line that served as our closet, and the cracked and pitted walls. I had turned it all into a wonderland for a princess. Imagining that I had enchanting powers, I would travel to places I had seen only in magazines and occasionally on our snowy black-and-white television screen when the electricity worked.
    But as soon as I would hear Abuela Anabela’s or my mother’s voice, I would blink my eyes and come crashing back down to reality. Never did I really believe I would be living in such a luxurious hacienda after I blinked. I had immediately felt foolish even dreaming of such things, such a place.
    Yet here I was, only not under the circumstances I would have included in my fantasy.
    I had been living in a beautiful hacienda my aunt owned, but just before Señor Bovio brought me here, I had been sent back to the dingy, dark, and dirty servant’s room in a separate building, the room in which I had been placed when I had first arrived from Mexico. That now seemed much farther in the past than it really was. All of the recent events in my life were jumbled and twisted in my mind, anyway. I wished it really had all been a dream, every moment. This wasn’t the first time