Did You Ever Have A Family Read Online Free PDF

grocery store. She sees her each day and keeps meaning to ask, but after she orders her coffee she can’t ever seem to find the words. Lately, Amy just brings the coffee, which excuses both of them from speaking.
    The lunch crowd has mostly left. Lydia pivots back, slightly, careful not to turn all the way around and be seen by the loud one or any of the women with her. She still doesn’t know quite who they are, but given what they are now talking about, she doesn’t want to be recognized. She wants to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. She looks again toward the kitchen, hoping to see Amy and signal for the check, but there is no one. She’s stuck and there is nothing she can do to keep from hearing this woman, who seems to not take even the shortest breath between her words.
    I don’t think the tent was burned. But the big oak tree behind the house caught fire. They still haven’t cut down what’s left. It stands there, black and horrible, like some scary Halloween decoration. Now, can you imagine?
    My brother used to work for Luke Morey. . . . Someone else is speaking now, someone younger . He was at the house the day before it happened, with his friends—mowing the lawn, picking up sticks, weeding the flower beds. . . . Silas still won’t talk about it. He’s only fifteen. The police asked him questions, the fire marshal, too, but he didn’t know anything. He worked for Luke for three summers.
    Lydia thought this kind of talk had died down. And even if it hadn’t, she wasn’t usually within earshot to hear it. Most people, if they saw her coming, changed the subject or got quiet. She’d become used to conversations ending abruptly and eyes looking away from her as she passed people in the pharmacy and the grocery store, oreven here at the coffee shop. But these women don’t see her.
    Amy must be resting—the lunch rush looked like it had been busy, and she’s at least five months along. Lydia remembers cleaning houses until her ninth month and going back to work with Luke when he was only two weeks old. She had to. Earl had thrown her out without a penny, and no one blamed him. Luke’s biological father didn’t know he existed, nor would he ever, and her mother had been barely scraping by on what she made at the bank. Lydia and her mother had been on their own for as long as she could remember. Her father died of a heart attack soon after she was born, and all he left behind was debt. An outstanding loan with the bank and payments on the truck he used to plow driveways with in the winter to make money. There is no pension plan when you sell firewood and plow snow for a living, Lydia’s mother would say when she was paying bills and smoking cigarettes at the table in her kitchen. He worked hard was half of the only other comment she’d make about Patrick Hannafin, who was, from the few photographs Lydia had seen, the source of her dark brown hair and high, sharp cheekbones. In every photograph he looked the same: handsome, tall, serious. He worked hard, Natalie Hannafin would say of her late husband, but his hands were allergic to money . His family had been in Wells since the 1800s, and at one time there had been as many of them as Moreys, but over the years, sickness and wanderlust and morebaby girls born than boys dwindled the fold, and now Lydia was the last Hannafin standing.
    Still, Lydia’s mother insisted she keep Earl Morey’s name after the divorce and that Luke keep it, too. It made no sense, and what was worse was that it seemed like an aggressive stance to take against a family who not only took their name seriously but didn’t take any more kindly to an open challenge than they did infidelity. Lydia knew her mother held out some tissue-thin hope that Earl would change his mind, forgive her daughter, and take Lydia and Luke back. Retaining that name was her one demand at the time, and because her apartment was the only place Lydia could go after the hospital, she agreed.