Kathleen Valentine Read Online Free PDF Page A

hiding my face. As I open my car I turn back. He stands before his shop watching me with eyes no longer innocent and a glitter on his cheek that reminds me of a tear caught in the light of a paper lantern hung in an ancient pin oak tree. A faint scent of mimosa drifts through the air as I turn the ignition and speed away.

Silvio stands on the porch in his white terry cloth bathrobe sipping coffee from a mug. He looks so tan. I wonder why I hadn’t noticed that before. As I get out of the car he leans against the trellis and lifts his mug in greeting, sun filtering through the wisteria washes a beautiful violet light over his strong features. He looks more handsome than anyone I ever remember seeing. Those black eyes are still deep and full of fire. I hold them with mine as I climb the stairs. He doesn’t move as I draw close and slip my hand inside his robe and caress him where he most loves me to caress him. He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.

"I love you, Silvio," I whisper, fondling him, feeling him twitch and quiver.

His smile is breathtaking and just a little stunned. "You better watch it," he says. "You’ll shock the neighbors."

"The hell with them," I say greedily kissing his throat and chest. "We were doing this before most of them were born."

He laughs and puts his arm around me taking me into the house. "That’s right," he says, "we sure were."

And in a little while the earth moves.
     

 
    ASA
    Listen. Those are mockingbirds. They always sing at this time of evening. Their song is my signal to pick Asa’s flowers. Tonight I’ll pick daisies and blue bonnets. Sundown isn’t far off and I try to go see him every evening at sundown. Oh, I do miss now and again—especially if the weather isn’t so good. This winter was a long one and some evenings I just don’t have the gumption to climb his hill. But he understands. No one ever understood me like Asa.

I was fifteen years old the first time I laid eyes on him. But I knew in that sure-fire, deep-down kind of way that I’d never love nobody else. He took the breath right out of me. Right now, I close my eyes, I can see him just like he was there in the morning sunshine. He was bent forward sawing on a board balanced across two saw horses, his curly brown hair falling over his forehead and those sinewy-lean muscles in his back and shoulders sparkling with sweat as they moved back and forth, back and forth, back and forth... He had his knee up on that board holding it down so’s he could saw it and his tan trousers pulled tight across his hips and thighs. Lord, I didn’t know nothing about men then but I knew he made my legs feel like I was wading upriver in ice water. My hands, they itched to stroke those drops of sweat away from that sun-toasted skin. And, other things I felt, I didn’t know how to call them...

Asa wasn’t what you’d call tall. Taller than me by a head but I always was a runt. His shoulders, oh Lord, it seemed to me they just blocked out the world. And he was so brown—I decided then and there he was made for me.

He was twenty-two and how I loved to look at him! He had come to see my Daddy cause he’d admired the gun stocks Daddy was known for making. When Asa got a look at the curly maple stock on the thirty-aught-six Daddy was oiling down his eyes near fell out of his head. Right then Asa had him a mind to have it.

"Can’t part with this’un," my Daddy says to him. "This’un’s for my daughter. She’s as fair a shot as any man but I reckon I got enough of this maple for one more."

But Asa was the feckless sort and didn’t have no money. He was a good enough carpenter and folks was happy to pay him but he weren’t the kind that could hold onto money. My Aunt Shoog told Mama that Asa had a taste for wine, women and song.

But Daddy never could say no to a man what admired his work so he said he’d make Asa a deal. He said we could do with a new chicken coop and a fence around the yard and that would be