Heart and Home Read Online Free PDF

up, but
for a moment we held one another’s gaze. Part of me wondered how I could have
forgotten about him, or even worse, never really noticed him. I should have at
least remembered how blue his eyes were.
    “Take care, now.”
    He gripped the handles and
turned his mother’s wheelchair toward the truck, leaning down to whisper
something in her ear as he maneuvered through the hilly grass. She reached up
and patted his hand, and I watched from my cold seat on the ground as he loaded
her into the passenger’s seat and helped her with her seatbelt. As he stepped
up into the driver’s seat, his gaze crawled across the grass to where I still
sat, and I thought he smiled at me one last time.
    Miss Rogers leaned in to
offer me her hand, “I’ll help you up, dear.”
    “Oh, no, Miss Rogers,” I
patted her hand. “I’ll manage.”
    It took everything in me to
steady my legs and stand. I smoothed the wrinkles from my skirt and brushed
away the clinging dried grass and leaves. I looked up just in time to watch
Troy’s white Ford disappear along the winding hill of the cemetery drive.

Chapter Four
     
     
     
    I felt like a ghost walking
through the buffet line at the fire hall, or maybe ghost isn’t quite right
because it wasn’t like they couldn’t see me. It was like one of those dreams
where you show up to take your SATs naked, or like I plunked a vulture hat down
on top of my head and was making a huge spectacle of myself. When anyone actually
dared to make eye contact they offered twitchy, insincere smiles, but the
minute I looked away I caught them from the corner of my eye putting their
heads together to whisper.
    It must have been the
fainting. I knew fainting was outrageous, and I hated myself for having
actually done it. A huge part of me wished I could go back in time and find
some way to not faint, but then I thought about his hands on the back of my
neck, his curious smile and those stunning eyes.
    Had he always been so
attractive? I mean, I’d never really paid attention to him beyond the whole
“Sonesville Hero” thing, and even that never interested me. He was just another
dumb jock, one of the holier than thou with no eye or mind for the rest of us,
or at least that was how my small circle of friends had seen his kind.
    I thought about my circle of
friends for a moment and wondered why Megan Ward and Karen Pryer hadn’t
contacted me since I’d been back in town. They both got angry with my best
friend Erika Lewis and me for forsaking the town. Best friends forever meant we
had to come back, and when we both refused to attend the five year reunion the
lines of communication closed. Erika and I still kept in touch, when our
careers allowed it. In fact, she sent condolence flowers and a card from South
Africa, where she was currently on one of the most significant archeological
digs of her career. Maybe the whole thing would have been easier with Erika, I
thought. The two of us lived in our own world through most of high school, our
big plans to escape the very glue that bonded us together.
    “Janice?”
    I turned from the tin-foil
platter of baked beans and into the curious, but hopeful stare of a forgettable
face. I vaguely remembered seeing her at the cemetery; she’d been the one who’d
stopped to talk to my father, her gentle hand reaching out in a sincere act of
comfort.  
    “Hi.” I scratched through
the faded memories of my youth to place that face. Scrawny, blond stringy hair,
but the worst crime she’d made against herself was the large, bright red
glasses frames straight out of the 1990s. Unfortunately, none of it helped me
identify her, and I felt a surge of guilt clench tight in my stomach.
    “Hi.” Everything about her
was nerves and insecurity. “I just wanted to say how sorry I am about your mom.
Chandra was such a wonderful person. She brightened up our scrapbook circle
every first and third Wednesday of the month.”
    “Thank you.”
    Scrapbooking, quilting,
canning, prize