Mrs. Kimble Read Online Free PDF

when she sleeps?”
    Birdie flushed. She’d started toilet training long ago, before her husband left. Now it seemed easier just to keep the baby in diapers.
    “Oh no,” she said. “Just when she sleeps.”
    She led the woman to the front door. Her face felt hot. There would be no more tea, no more discussion of lunches and diapers. The county woman trailed behind her. Birdie imagined her gawking at the photos on the wall. Well, let her, she thought. Let her look.
    “I’m sorry you missed Charlie,” said Birdie.
    “I can wait.”
    “He usually plays in the woods all day. You know boys.” She opened the front door.
    “All right then.” The woman hesitated in the doorway. “You might want to call the phone company. Get that business straightened out.”
    “I will,” said Birdie.
    Firmly she closed the door.
     
    C HARLIE TOOK the long way home, avoiding the Hogans’ yard. He crossed the street and followed the sidewalk up the hill to his house. The lady was standing on his front step when he came up the street. She shaded her eyes and smiled down at him.
    “Are you Charlie?” she asked.
    He said nothing. His feet felt raw. A blister had opened on his big toe.
    “It’s all right. I was just visiting with your mother.” She sat down on the step and smoothed her white pants over her knees. “Are you coming home for lunch?”
    His stomach hurt at the word. “Yes’m.”
    “What do you usually have for lunch?”
    He couldn’t think. All day long he dreamed of food, but now he couldn’t think of a single thing. He looked at the lady’s shoes.
    “Pancakes,” he said at last. “My daddy is making us pancakes.”
    The lady smiled. She wasn’t pretty like his mother but he liked how she was: large and soft, like a comfortable chair.
    “You wait right here.” She crossed the street to a big green car and came back with a paper sack. “Here,” she said.
    Charlie looked inside. There was a meat sandwich, a slice of cake wrapped in plastic. He saw that the lady was giving him her lunch.
    “You be a good boy,” she said. “You mind your mother.”

D rinking, Birdie remembered. Late summer at Hambley Bible College, her third-floor dormitory room stifling hot, rules for when you could eat or sleep or shower, the length of your skirt, what you could listen to on the radio. The dormitory a world of women: their voices, their laughter, damp stockings and underthings drying in the communal bathroom. After eight P.M ., quiet hours: no speaking above a whisper, only studying. Exception on Wednesday, choir practice, the only time a Hambley girl was allowed to raise her voice.
    Reverend Kimble directed the choir with watery strokes, eyes closed, a heaviness in his fingertips, as if they’d been dipped in something sweet and elastic. He was young, just past thirty; except for the elderly dean, he was the only man the girls had seen in months. After practice they crowded around him, giggling, asking questions. He had a remarkable voice, deep and resonant; he gave his full attention to each girl as she spoke, as if she were the only one in the room. He did not appear to play favorites, though there were rumors. A girl had been seen coming out of his office, a snooty blond from Charleston, tall and exquisite. For all her beautyshe had a voice like a toad; she did not sing in the choir. Why, then, would she visit the reverend in his office? Publicly and privately, the girls could only imagine.
    At practice they followed his hands with their eyes. The hands told them when to breathe, to release, to fall silent. Birdie had studied art history; watching him, she thought of the Pietà: Mary weeping over her son’s crucified body, his naked arms smooth as milk, his chest delicately ribbed like the underside of a flower. She imagined Reverend Kimble’s shoulders bare beneath his shirt, his body the long white body of Christ.
    One evening he approached her after practice. “Vivian,” he said. “Are you having problems