Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

closed the door.
    I felt my face blush, decidedly rejected. But then I realized I was on my own and could do as I thought best, better yet, as I wished (odd to think but it seemed that in simply knowing there were women out there thinking more freely, gave me permission to do so, too). I raised my hand to knock again, to offer assistance this time. After all, Robert wasn’t here to hold me back. But then I lowered it. Perhaps I was intruding. Hadn’t I embarrassed my husband and his mother’s spirit enough for one day? Besides, Aimee looked embarrassed enough already. With reluctance, I turned away.
    The sun had come out, but I felt as gloomy inside as Aimee’s living room. For lack of knowing what to do, I returned home; at least here I knew well enough.
    Our front door squeaked like the lid of a coffin. A longing from deep within surfaced and bubbled in my ears like the soapsuds in mywash water. As much for myself as for Aimee was the desire to reach out to a friend. We needed each other. The secretariat against the back wall of the parlor gave me an idea. A note! I would write a note to Aimee and slip it under her door.
    With shawl and boots still on, I rushed over to the desk, pulled off my gloves, pulled out the paper and pencil from their cubbyholes, and wrote carefully in my schoolgirl hand, “Dear Aimee, I wish to be your friend. I am only a moment away, if you wish to talk. I’ve decided to come out into the sunshine. Please join me. Ruby.”
    I read it twice and hesitated. Before losing my nerve altogether, I folded the paper and walked back to Aimee’s door and slipped the paper under. Aimee’s parlor windows faced the front, her house being in a similar design to ours, so I hoped that Aimee could see me approaching and might spot the note at once. At any rate, hopefully Aimee would find it before her husband arrived home from work.
    I walked along the boardwalk toward home feeling lighter, in at least making an attempt.
    Now that I was a free-thinker in its infancy, I became so bold as to actually stop on the street and openly examine the houses there. To the right, past Aimee’s house, the cobbled street stretched into a dirt road which if followed for about eight miles led to my family’s dairy farm. On my left, the street eventually reached the center of town. At the end of my block was the blacksmith’s shop, which was slowly converting into a motor car garage to repair those “mechanical beasts that were invading the town” as Robert expressed it.
    I noted very few other changes here the last twelve years; two houses across the street with empty fields on either side; nine houses on my side of the street. All had wood siding painted in white, yellow, or blues; only Robert’s home remained in the darker greens and browns, as if sitting there in a bad mood amongst the bright and cheerful. All had wide front porches or covered verandahs, some which wrapped around one side. Fortunate owners decorated their front yards in welcoming flowers and shrubs. I was taught if you’re going to work at a garden, make it work for you. Thus only a vegetable garden in the backyard was permitted; my only flowers werelavender bushes along the back yard fence that I dried for oils and sachets.
    Construction on these homes had begun some thirty years before, during the building boom following the Civil War. Many who lived here were the original owners, as were my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Margaret and Jonathan Robert Wright. Jonathan had been a cabinetmaker in his living years, and had built all the cabinets and staircases on this street. Our staircase, with its intricate scrolling on the landing post, was the finest in the area, or so my mother-in-law used to tell me (told to her by her husband, no doubt; she wouldn’t have known any other way).
    I wanted to know if this was true; I wanted to know the intricate details of someone else’s life, I wanted to know if other women felt as I did. Surely I