Good Hope Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

the torn papers and soiled photographs on the coffee table. Taking the picture of the newborn baby girl from my back pocket, I propped it near the candle. I stared into her cloudy blue eyes, wondering who she was and if she was all right. The candle burned lower, flickering as it drowned in a pool of melted wax. I closed my eyes, drifting.
    Nate’s voice awakened me. “Hey, Jenilee, are you sleepin’? Good God, girl, you don’t do nothin’ but sleep.” I opened my eyes to see him standing in the doorway, his big grin beneath overgrown sandy blond hair, his Poetry Pirates ball cap pulled low in front, the brim curled. Nate was always smiling. When he smiled like that, he looked more like twelve than sixteen, like a little boy full of mischief. “Hey, Jenilee . . . hey, Jenilee . . .”
    I laughed and felt my body jerk fitfully. Nate vanished like a puff of smoke, and I searched the flickering orb of light from the candle, hoping to find him in the melting shadows. The room smelled of burning wax and rain somewhere far away.
    “Nate?” My voice crackled into the air like static on a radio. “Nate?”
    Nate wasn’t there. I was dreaming.
    The events of the past day flooded my mind as I sat looking through the window at the empty driveway, knowing that if nothing were wrong, Daddy and Nate would have been home hours ago. My heart ripped down the middle, half hope, half dread, a thin, dark line in between.
    I leaned closer to the candle, staring at the picture of the baby. Beside it lay the sheet of paper with the flawless cursive handwriting. I picked it up and started to read.
    The top was torn away, so that only the lower part remained. The paper was old and yellowed, water-stained on one corner. The torn edge was white, like a fresh wound.
    Touching it, I read the words.
    ... I do not know how to imagine my world, because I cannot imagine a world without you close to me. This terrible separation has been more than I can bear. I sometimes wonder if I can go on, rise and dress each day, cook, eat, work, when you are in a place beyond my imagining. Somewhere half a world away, cold or lost or hungry.
    Yet love has no weight, or size, or substance. It does not know the barriers of time or space or distance, of life and death. Love travels on the wind. Love is greater than the trials and the suffering of this world. Love endures all things.
    I imagine traveling on the wind like a puff of smoke, seeking you. I imagine floating around you, encircling you. You are not lost or cold or hungry. You are in my arms, and I in yours. We can never be far from one another.
    Close your eyes, love.
    Imagine.
    You are home.
     
    Tenth, November, 1944
    I closed my eyes and imagined my little brother, laughing, teasing, driving a little too fast along the county road toward home. I listened to the ring of his laughter until I could believe that what was in my mind was real. I pictured him coming home, as if wanting could make it so.
    I could not imagine the world any other way.

CHAPTER 3
    EUDORA GIBSON
     
     
    W hen an angel comes to you, it will wear the face of someone you know. I learned that from the old Mexican tinker who worked for Daddy when I was a little girl.
    “An angel will wear the face of someone you know, so that you will not be afraid,” he said in thick, foreign-sounding English. “So that you will listen . . .”
    It was 1932, and I was just eight years old, a barefoot slip of a girl. I looked at that tinker and thought he must be very, very wise. There was a soft look in his tobacco brown eyes, a hardness in his coppery skin that made him seem ancient.
    That night I dreamed about an angel with Grandma Benton’s face. She smiled at me, and touched my face, and told me she loved me, and to take care of my mama.
    When I told Mama about the dream and about what the tinker said, she took after me with a bar of soap. “Don’t you be speakin’ none of that voodoo nonsense of Ignacio’s, you hear,” she hollered.