Nell Read Online Free PDF Page B

plunged through to the thigh. That had been an awful feeling, her leg suddenly trapped in the splintered and shattered damp boards. The steps were old and rotten and dangerous, but it would be expensive to replace them. She didn’t think she could afford to have them replaced this year.
    And she didn’t know what she was going to do about the two dead elms at the back of the property. They were dangerous, too, with their arching dead limbs that crashed to the ground during wind storms. Part of one elm hung over a neighbor’s yard, and Nell knew it was her responsibility to have those elms taken down before they fell on the yard in a littered mess or, worse, on an animal or person. But the cost of taking down those elms …
    What was she going to do? How could she manage it? She couldn’t. She would have to sell the house. She couldn’t possibly keep up any longer with the outside of her house, not even with the lawn. The first summer she’d been divorced, she had dated Steve, and he had done her lawn work for her—mowed the grass, trimmed the bushes—and had been pleased to do it; he liked doing that sort of thing. Perhaps this year, if she continued seeing Stellios, he would mow her lawn—but she couldn’t stay with a man just because he might mow her lawn; that was an awful way to think and she hated herself for the thought. Oh, looking out her windows tonight at the April ground that would soon be overgrown with all that damn grass —that did not calm her at all. It made her stomach clench.
    When the Panic Nights were especially bad, and this promised to be one of them, Nell would quickly move from worry about the present to the definite philosophical belief that this, her frightening life, was what she deserved, was what she had coming toher, for being such a terrible little vain fool in her youth. She hadn’t known a thing then, not a thing. All she had cared about were her clothes and her hair and her fingernails and the length of her eyelashes, all she had attempted was to attract men and be envied because of her looks and acting abilities, all she had wanted had been more of everything for herself, and she had had no compassion, and she had never thought that she could get older.…
    And now here she was. So much gone, so little left.
    Why had she been such a little fool? She wasn’t genetically stupid, she had only acted that way.
    It was hard not to blame her parents for spoiling her, but after all, really, what had they done but love her and believe in her? She was their only child. She had been beautiful and unusual, with lots of reddish-brown hair and unusual reddish-brown eyes and wide cheekbones, a wide mouth. She had been tall and willowy, lovely. You can do anything, her parents had told her; you can do anything, her high school teachers had told her; you can do anything, they had said to her in college; you are one of the special ones, you can be a Broadway star, a Hollywood star, you will be famous, wealthy, successful. You are one of the lucky ones.
    She had believed them all. When she graduated from the University of Iowa, she had been ready to take on the world—she had been ready for the world to see her. She had been accepted as an apprentice with a summer theater company that performed at a tourist resort in Maine. She went, prepared to be discovered.
    Now she did not know, and she never would know, if she had married Marlow because she loved him or because she had seen all those other beautiful, talented girls and had gotten scared, had run into marriage for the safety of it. Now, leaning against a window, Nell smiled at herself: ha, she thought, so much for the safety of marriage. Well, then she had reveled in her little victory: she had married Marlow St. John and had secretly thought of him as her prize, her trophy, her bouquet of roses at the end of the performance. If she was never to win an award for her acting, she would at least win this award for her life.
    Oh God, had she