Heart and Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

watermelons at the county fair, volunteer work. My mother was
clearly a superhero.
    “She always talked about you
and your work. She was so proud. In fact, she was working on a whole scrapbook
of your career. She started it with the school paper and the articles you wrote
for the Shopper and the Sonesville Standard, and of course she
had a ton of articles from the Tribune-Review .”
    “She did?”
    Maybe if I’d come home she
might have shared them with me. I didn’t even know she’d liked to scrapbook,
but the last thing I wanted was for any of these people to know how little I
really knew about my own mother.
    “She did, yes, she did.
Scrapbooking… it was just one of her things. She had a lot of uh things.”
    “Yeah,” the woman nodded. “I
have some of the projects she was working on at my house. Maybe while you’re
home you’d like to come over and pick them up.”
    Home. There was a
conflicting ache in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t really been planning on
staying long enough to call it home, now that she mentioned it. “I—yeah,
I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I have work and…”
    “Oh, no, no. Of course you
do.” At some point she’d reached out and laid her hands on my arm. I hadn’t
even noticed. “I’m sure you’ll be heading straight back now that all of this is
over, but you know, in case you don’t or something, I really think she’d like
you to have them.”
    “Yeah, okay,” if only I
could actually remember her name.
    “You’re not over here
bothering poor Janice with minutes from the quilting bee, are you Becky?” The
shadow that moved over us was Amber Williams, complete with a plastic fork
stabbed into a piece of lemon cake.
    Becky Raynard. I should have
recognized her, but the believer in me wanted to have faith that the underdog
could rise up against the challenges after high school. I felt ashamed now that
I hadn’t recognized Becky, but then having been tormented most of her life by
the Amber Williamses of the world, she learned the effective art of making
herself invisible when necessary. I watched Becky, her demeanor shrinking
impossibly inward, and realized if she suppressed herself any more than she
already had she’d wind up imploding, or something equally messy.
    “Amber,” I turned a plastic
smile on her. “Becky and I were just talking about scrapbooking and what a
fantastic way it is to bring friends together. In fact, I am seriously
considering extending my stay just so I catch up with Becky and her friends at
the next meeting.”
    There was a new glow in
Becky’s face, as though that simple statement really turned her whole day
around. Why I said it I really had no idea because the truth was I wanted to
get as far away from Sonesville and the small town pettiness of people like
Amber Williams as possible. In the city pettiness was an anonymous crime, the
type of thing you could completely overlook and ignore. In Sonesville, it was
in your face everywhere you turned.
    “Right.” Amber’s stiff nod
looked like it made her neck hurt. “Well, I just wanted to stop over and make
sure you were all right. Everyone was a little worried after you fainted.”
    It took everything in me not
to say, “I’ll just bet they were.” I could feel my lips pinching in on each
other in a scowl, and was thankful I’d caught it before it could satisfy any
twisted plans she had. Same old Amber always seemed to know how to stir up
trouble by digging down around the roots.
    “I’m feeling much better
now, thanks.”
    “Well, you know, my mom is a
nurse.” And what that had to do with the price of tea in China was anybody’s
guess.
    “I’ll be sure to call her if
I need anything.”
    Becky was like a hinge
between us, the only thing keeping us civil in the ultimate stare-down. Had we
been alone, Amber might say whatever was on her mind without refrain, but
Becky’s presence seemed to stifle her a little. Even as she had just gone out
of her way to make