One Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

down at the table, but she didn’t talk to Raelene. She talked to me. About what? About rhubarb. “Aren’t the winter schoolers slackers?” she said. “We were supposed to have rhubarb pie tonight. The little slobs pick too damn slow.”
    After some more of this talk Raelene stood up and said, “I’ll be going,” and Gladys said, “Good-bye,” and I said, “Stop back.”
    Raelene walked out the door and only I got up and watched her walk back down the hill toward the camp. She was just a proud, sorry little colt in pink Chinese slippers. Gladys stayed put and said not a word, but you could feel her thinking.
    â€œHow sweet,” I said. “How sweet that she’d come here to visit you after all these years.”
    â€œLooks like she needs a good bath,” Gladys said, and fixed herself a drink.
    *  *  *
    After a couple of weeks, when some of the campers began to show up, part of Raelene’s job at that camp was to wake up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings and play the guitar at 5:30 A . M . with the younger girl campers gathered around her out on the porch of the main building where Gladys and I cooked. Raelene had a beat-up red guitar and no case. She could play decent, but her real talent was her voice. She sung pure as a night bird in a marsh. The children always made her sing the old songs like “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and “A Hundred Miles,” not the real little kids but the elevens and twelves; those girls liked to sing and feel their eyes well up with tears. “Lord, I’m five hundred miles away from home,” they’d sing and then they’d cry, partly homesick and partly happy that in the world was a song exactly about them. Raelene would stop and try to play a different tune like “The Cat Came Back,” but the girls didn’t like it much. The porch is right outside the kitchen. I’ve heard “Leaving on a Jet Plane” for ten years of early mornings. Case you’re wondering, it don’t hold up.
    So the first time I noticed Gladys taking a shine to Raelene was one morning when Gladys was standing by the kitchen window with a mug of coffee watching Raelene sing. Gladys almost never smiled, but she did that morning. It was like Raelene’s bird voice got into Gladys’s body. She was singing that song called “The Dutchman.” On Gladys’s lips was just a small smile, a gentle smile, but somehow it seemed like her whole body was smiling. Gladys didn’t know I was watching her, and I wish I didn’t do what I did; I said, “Isn’t that a pretty voice?” and wrecked the spell Gladys was under. The smile fell off her face, her body went back to itself, and she looked over at me without saying a word. I had trespassed. I had caught her beginning to love.
    It’s strange that she’s no longer cooking here. Gladys always cooked.
    My first memory of Gladys is when she’s only five years old, standing in the old sunny kitchen and she’s stirring something in a bowl. Since I’m barely four, she looks big to me, and so wonderful. I wanted to be her. Who wouldn’t? She was five years old and she could make a cake!
    My father said when she was a little older, maybe nine, “Gladys, you cook better than your mother. Now how is that? What side of the family are you taking after? Not mine. Not your mother’s. Where do you come from, girl?”
    He was always asking Gladys that, about once a week. It was his little joke to pretend Gladys came from somewhere else, that she was so fine you couldn’t explain her origins. Me, he could explain too easy. He would peer at me and say, “You’re just like my mother. You look like her, you talk like her, you screw up like her.” He’d say it smiling. I’d always laugh like he was just joking with me, but I knew all the same it was not really joking; even when he