Five Minutes in Heaven Read Online Free PDF

Elkins. And God bless my new pal, Molly, and keep her safe. But not Ace Kilgore. Amen.”
    Mrs. Elkins looked at Jude questioningly as she smoothed her blond pageboy with one hand. But then she just stood up and folded back the bedspread. “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let those old mosquitoes bite!” she called as she closed the door.
    Molly and Jude scrambled up on the bed. Each grabbed a pillow. Every time Sidney tried to crawl onto the mattress, they beat him back with the pillows. The bed was a raft, adrift on an ocean full of ravenous sharks with flashing white teeth. Sidney crouched down on his front paws, cropped tail wagging frantically. He began to bark.
    â€œOh, shut up, Sidney,” muttered Molly, dropping her pillow. “Sharks don’t bark.” She collapsed with a bounce on the mangled sheets.
    Sidney crept up the bed and slithered between Molly and Jude, where he lay panting dolefully in time to the pulsing locusts outside. Molly’s father had started snoring down the hall, like a monster growling in a cave. He looked like a monster, too, with dark, curly hair all over his arms and eyebrows that stuck straight out like the bristles of a toothbrush. Molly said he drove around to farms buying cowhides that got cut up and turned into belts at the tannery Sandy Andrews’s father owned.
    Molly went downstairs to the kitchen, wearing only her shorty pajama bottoms. When she returned, carrying two bowls, she paused for a moment, framed by the doorway, bare chest tanned and smooth except for two pink nipples like cinnamon valentine hearts. Her black hair, which Jude had never seen unbraided before, was floating around her face the way Jude’s mother’s hair did in a photo on Jude’s bedside table. In that photo, she held Jude’s chubby cheek against her own on Jude’s first birthday. She had a white rose in her hair, perfect white teeth, and pale dreamy eyes.
    â€œWhy are you staring at me like that?” asked Molly when she reached the bed and handed Jude a bowl of raspberry sherbet.
    â€œI didn’t realize you were beautiful,” replied Jude.
    â€œI am not,” said Molly, eyes blazing in the faint glow coming through the window from the streetlight. “If you want to be my friend, take it back right now.”
    Crossing her fingers, Jude said, “Okay, I take it back.”
    Leaning against the quilted headboard, they licked the tart sherbet off their spoons in a strained silence.
    â€œDo you like God?” Jude finally asked.
    â€œSure. He’s okay.” Molly offered her spoon to Sidney, who daintily poked at the sherbet with his large pink tongue.
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œHow come?”
    â€œHe took my mother to His house. She wants to come back home now, but He won’t let her.”
    Molly set her bowl on the bed for Sidney to finish. “Well, I guess I don’t like Him anymore, either, then.”
    Jude decided that Molly was her new best friend.
    Once the lights were off in all the houses down the street, they pulled on their shorts and tiptoed down the carpeted stairs and out the front door. The locusts were so loud that they seemed to be gathered inside Jude’s head. Swarms of fireflies were making the star-specked night sky sparkle like a black diamond. Jude and Molly trotted across the straw-strewn lawn, the dew chilly on their bare feet, Sidney at their heels.
    At Sandy’s house, they found the hose coiled behind the foundation shrubs as Sandy had promised. Dragging it across the street, they stuck the nozzle into a Commie Killer trench. Then they re-crossed the street and turned on the faucet that protruded from the foundation bricks.
    Crouched behind the geometrical yews, ducking a circling mosquito, Jude asked, “Why do you think Ace is so mean?”
    â€œMomma says people are mean because they get up on the wrong side of bed in the morning,” said Molly, arm draped