Guide Me Home Read Online Free PDF

I think you’d be a good worker, all right?”
    Rebekah forced a smile. “All right. Thank you, Mr. Cooper.”
    He offered one more quick smile and then turned his attention back to chopping vegetables.
    With a sigh, Rebekah pocketed the coins and left the kitchen. She stepped from the warm room into chilly, moist air. Those clouds would let loose any time now. She needed to hurry home. But somehow she couldn’t convince her legs to move faster than a snail’s pace.
    She’d set her hopes high, so sure she’d find a job and would be able to buy the marker for Andy. She’d gotten Daddy’s hopes up, too. How could she tell him she’d failed? Her chest felt tight and heavy, the way it had the day they laid Andy in his grave. Losing the chance to buy the headstone and all the other things she let herself dream about was like burying her brother all over again.
    Fat raindrops began to fall from the sky as she reached the edge of her yard. She ran the last few feet and gave a lithe leap onto the porch just ahead of the real soaking rain. The slanting porch roof would hold back any water from entering the cabin, so she left the door open to let in light as she stepped over the threshold.
    “Mama, I’m back. I—” She stopped and looked around in confusion. The cabin was empty. Where was everybody? A slip of paper waited in the middle of the table. She crossed the floor and picked up the sheet.
Dear Bek, Daddy and me tuk the leastuns to Susan Lindseys to trade a gallon of sorghum for black walnuts. Spring soup in the kettul. Back soon. Mama.
    She dropped the note on the table and sighed. Mama’s flavorful wild greens and ham soup, a treat this time of year, held no appeal. She wanted to talk to Daddy. “Back soon,” the note said, but with the rain coming down in buckets, she didn’t expect Daddy to leave the Lindsey place until he could be sure the little girls wouldn’t get soaked to the skin. Trudy had always been prone to colds. Spring colds could linger a long time, and they didn’t have spare money for doctoring. She likely wouldn’t see them for an hour or two.
    She flicked a glance around the room, shivering. How could this cabin, her only home, seem so forbidding when everyone was gone? She opened the shutters on the front windows to let in as much light as possible. Then she hung Mama’s basket on its hook, clanked the coins into the money can, and went to her bedroom and changed out of her good dress into one of her work dresses. As she exited her bedroom, a flash of lightning briefly lit the cabin’s main room, and her gaze collided with the ladder hung high on the back wall.
    Thunder boomed and her heart double-thudded. She hugged herself, uncertain whether the thunder or the ladder had caused the gallop in her chest. She slowly crossed the floor while rain pelted the roof and a cool breeze snaked in to chill her bare feet and arms. She stood up on tiptoe and slid her finger along one side rail. She wrinkled her nose. Sticky cobwebs collected between the rungs, proof of its long time going unused.
    She remembered the day Daddy put it on the wall. The same day they’d buried Andy. He’d pounded in nails and hung it high so none of his gals could bring it down. Rebekah asked him why he didn’t take it out to the shed, use it to climb up on the roof or to reach the fruit in one of the cherry trees growing in the woods nearby. She could still see the stunned look on Daddy’s face, hear his pained reply.
    “It’s Andy’s ladder.”
    She sank back onto her heels, nodding in agreement with the memory. Andy had built the ladder himself to gain access to the small loft, his own little space away from his sisters. He’d go up there, pull the ladder in behind him, and then make faces at them from the opening. Daddy never used Andy’s ladder. Mama never let anybody go into the loft. As far as Rebekah knew, Andy’s trunk of clothes, his mattress, and the quilt Granny Hardin had sewn for him when he was