Nancy Culpepper Read Online Free PDF Page A

that Jack would have to drive back to Pennsylvania alone.
    “What are you feeling?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.” She spread cold lotion on her legs. “I feel inconvenienced,” she said. “I mean, it doesn’t seem personal. She was so old.”
    Jack said, “I hope you’re relieved, Nancy. She’s been a terrible strain on your parents.”
    “I know it,” Nancy said, pulling on corduroy slacks. “She’s driven my mother crazy. If I cry, it will be for my mom.”
    “Maybe you should wait and go down in a week or two and spend some time with your parents. They might need you more then.”
    “That might be better—and I have that important meeting at work on Tuesday.” Nancy began to relax. Jack was always so clear-headed. She put on an Icelandic wool sweater she had bought in Scotland once when she and Jack went looking for the Loch Ness monster. Jack called the sweater her “sheep.”
    “Why
don’t
you go down later?” he said, looking happier. He did a few deep knee bends.
    Nancy gazed at snapshots of previous guests on a bulletin board in the dining room. On a paper plate thumbtacked next to the tide tables, someone had scrawled, YES, THE MOONIES ARE HERE. A smiling gray-haired man in a striped sweater said to Jack, “We come here every year. We were here all week and the weather was
glorious
until today.”
    “There’s an artists’ colony here as good as on the Cape,” a short woman, his wife, said, beaming.
    Nancy took orange juice, coffee, and a blueberry muffin from a sideboard and sat at the corner of the long table, facing the ocean. Jack sat down and handed her a napkin and silverware. “You forgot these,” he said gently. He chatted with the cheerful couple while Nancy ate and gazed out the window at the vacant sky and water. Her appetite surprised her. The muffins were homemade, according to the other guests.
    Jack brought Nancy another muffin. “Are you O.K.?” he asked.
    “I think so.”
    “Do you know what you want to do?”
    “I don’t want to travel in the rain.” She spread butter on the muffin and watched it crumble. She said, “When my parents were young, they wanted to build a house of their own half a mile down the road. They wanted to buy a piece of land and build. Instead, they built that house next door, on Granddaddy’s land. Mom remembers how Granny fretted at the idea of Daddy moving half a mile away. She said, ‘Well, what if he was to get sick? Who would take care of him?’ She didn’t want her precious son out of her sight and didn’t trust my mother to look out for him. Mom bore that insult to this day. And she ended up taking care of Granny all those years.”
    “Think of how free your parents are going to be now,” Jack said.
    Nancy ate a bite of muffin. “I know I should go,” she said slowly. “But it seems to me that if you have a choice between a wedding and a funeral, you should go to the wedding.”
    “It’s up to you.”
    “I know you want to take pictures, and we drove so far.”
    More guests were entering the dining room, talking about the weather.
    Nancy said to Jack, “Later I’ll double-check and see if there’s some way I could get there late tonight or tomorrow morning. And I’ll call home later today. They’ll be at the funeral home all afternoon anyway.”
    Suddenly, a small blond dog rushed into the dining room, followed by the woman who ran the guesthouse. She cried, “Tuffie—get back here! You know you’re not supposed to be in Blue Country!”
    The gray-haired man said to her, “It’s too bad you have to live in the back of the house, without this beautiful view.”
    “Oh, in the winter we always move into Blue Country,” she said, smiling and scooping up the dog from the blue rug. She tugged the dog’s ribboned topknot. “Bad boy, Tuffie.”
    “That dog doesn’t look half as guilty as I do,” Nancy said to Jack. The wedding had been planned for the beach, but because of the rain it was moved to a summer camp