Delia's Heart Read Online Free PDF

funds, you can waste them any way you like, Sophia, but once you do,” Tía Isabela added, her eyes quickly glowing into hot coals, “you won’t get any money from me.” She sat back. “And I doubt you would get any from Edward.”
    “No,” Sophia said wagging her head. “I wouldn’t get anything from Edward. He’d give it all to her,” shesaid, nodding at me. “The two of them don’t fool me, even if they fool you,” she fired back at her mother.
    “Fool me? Fool me about what? What are you saying, you idiot?”
    “Nothing,” Sophia replied, picking up her cereal spoon again and smiling. “Only…you’d better start wondering why Edward and Jesse spend so much time alone with her.”
    Tía Isabela looked at me.
    The implied accusation now brought a crimson tint into my face.
    “Sometimes the innocent look guilty because they are so embarrassed by the innuendos and they are so outraged they are too vigorous in their denials and fit Shakespeare’s great line in Hamlet , ‘The lady doth protest too much, me thinks,’” Mr. Buckner had said just yesterday during our reading of Hamlet . “The line between the innocent and the guilty gets blurred.”
    I looked at Sophia when he told us that. She was doodling in her notebook and not paying attention, as usual. I wondered, if she had paid attention, would it make any difference?
    “That’s not funny, Sophia,” Tía Isabela said. “What happens in this house reflects on me. Just remember that.”
    “What happens in this house reflects on all of us, Mother. I live here, too. You, yourself, have told me that you think Edward dotes on her far too much. Well, maybe they do more than dote, and right under your nose.”
    “That’s enough,” Tía Isabela snapped. “I have a full day today, and I don’t need to be aggravated before Ieven begin. You had better watch your own behavior, Sophia, and not worry about your brother.”
    “Suit yourself, Mother,” Sophia said, keeping that infuriating smile. “If you want to bury your head in the sand, you have no problem. We live in the desert.”
    Tía Isabela slammed her spoon down, rose, her breakfast half eaten, her coffee nearly untouched, and marched out in a fury.
    I looked at Sophia. She was so content with herself for getting to her mother that I had to wonder if they ever loved each other. Did she ever cling to her when she was little? I couldn’t remember a time since I was here when she and her mother kissed or hugged.
    “Satisfied?” she asked me, as if I had been the one to cause the trouble.
    I didn’t reply.
    Two days later, without my saying a word to anyone who might have said something to Danielle, Sophia received an invitation to her party. She came into my room that night wearing a very deep, satisfied smile.
    “Well, look what came in the mail to me,” she said, showing me the invitation.
    I started to deny having anything to do with it, but she stopped me.
    “I know it wasn’t you. It’s my mother’s doing,” she said. “She was worried about her status in society, I’m sure.”
    And then she tore the invitation in half and threw it into the wastebasket, just as she had done to mine. She spit on it as well.
    “I wouldn’t be caught dead there,” she said. She turned and marched away, slamming my bedroom door behind her.
    The following Saturday, however, she was out shopping for a new dress that would outdo mine, no matter what the price.
    She wouldn’t be caught dead going to the party? I guessed she’d hired a hearse to bring her to it, I thought, and laughed to myself. It felt like I had won a small victory and any victory, no matter how small, was an achievement in this house.
    But I should have remembered what she and her girlfriends were so fond of saying all the time.
    “He who laughs last laughs best.”

2
Christian Taylor
    “B onjour, Delia. Comment allez-vous ?” Christian Taylor asked me as we were entering French class.
    This was the one class that Sophia