Embrace Me Read Online Free PDF

and sugar.
    I eat all the sugar I can.
    It’s hard to chew without showing the world or dripping, so hot cereal or sopping shredded wheat, as long as nobody’s around to watch me drip, works.
    I pull a straw from the bag I keep in the second drawer down next to the fridge. I sip my coffee, eat my cereal, and read the Sunday paper, poring over the real estate insert, looking for good ideas. Lella and I will need a rancher. I won’t have the strength to carry her up and down the stairs forever.

    Four cups of coffee later, a fresh pot almost brewed, the clop of feet vibrates the outside stairs leading to the kitchen—wooden stairs, sixth step a little wonky.
    The kitchen door swings open, the curtains on the half window flying out like a dancer’s gown. I quickly pull the green scarf from around my neck over my nose to cover my face from the eyes down. You gotta pay to see Lizard Woman.
    Blaze, Rick, and some guy I’ve never seen before butt their way into my Sunday ritual.
    Now Blaze should be an overweight redhead wearing too-tight sweaters and floral pedal pushers. But Blaze looks rather funereal. Not after the Morticia Addams fashion, but like a funeral parlor. White skin, white blouses, white legs. Dark hair, dark brows, dark skirts, dark shoes, because funeral parlors are almost always black and white, and is there some kind of code about that, some kind of association morticians belong to that tells them how to paint their establishments?
    Blaze works down at the local life insurance company, reminding us further of our own mortality and that accidents can happen. As if we’d somehow missed that.
    She sets down her purse. “What a gathering!” Blaze is a Jesus freak, which is probably why she relates to us. She’s been going to a new church. “Sit down at the table with Valentine, Gus. Is there more coffee, or did you finish it up?”
    â€œThere’s more.”
    Rick pulls out a chair for the guest who takes off a leather jacket that goes perfectly with his gray biker beard. Although it does looked combed. He smoothes a faded red T-shirt. He adjusts a pair of glasses with lenses so thick his eyes look like they’re sitting behind him in the next room. Graying dreadlocks hang halfway down his back, and heavy, stainless steel hoops pull down his earlobes. And tattoos . . . everywhere.
    â€œYou vying for a spot as the tattooed man?” I ask, pointing to his arms covered with intricately patterned tattoo sleeves. Not the usual skulls and naked bimbos for this guy. Swirls of flowers and vines on the right with a couple of woodland creatures peeking out. Kelp in a current and a rainbow assortment of fish on the left.
    He smiles. Shy. “No. Just like tattoos, I guess.”
    His voice is husky and scratched, higher pitched in a damaged way. He either smoked his voice away or something else took it. It’s pleasant though, nonthreatening, even if it is hard to hear. His build is a little husky too.
    â€œHow come you went so pretty?”
    â€œReminds me of beauty.”
    I look away, pick up my coffee. “Oh. Right.”
    He rushes in. “Because beauty, real beauty, is usually hidden, right? It’s like the animals and the fish. They’re looking out, kinda shy, right, from their hiding spots?”
    â€œYeah, I can see that.”
    Blaze picks up the coffeepot. “That’s what I love about human oddities. Same thing.”
    The man reddens.
    Rick gets a couple of mugs down off the shelf over the stained porcelain sink. “So this is Augustine, Valentine. A good friend.”
    â€œThen why hasn’t he been here sooner?”
    â€œBlaze just now invited me.” Augustine shakes my hand. “Valentine. There’s a name you don’t hear often. Not that I can talk.”
    â€œYou don’t look like a saint to me,” I say.
    â€œYou know of Saint Augustine?”
    â€œNah, not really. Just the name.”
    Rick