One Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

the sun my father made her wear a hat to protect her skin, which was snow white. He wouldn’t let her go out in the garden without sleeves.
    Maybe Gladys didn’t get fat when she lived there because she was always cooking and a cook never eats as much as others. They get bored with their own creations. I should know.
    I ate too much of what Gladys cooked and went from being a plump child to a plumper teenager, and my father never told me to sign up for reducing classes or sent me off to fat girls’ camp. But if Gladys started looking too plump, which sometimes she did, he’d have her walk ten miles into town and back, or swim laps in this bay down in Lewes, or maybe run back and forth on Slaughter Beach. He’d drive her down there, sit in the car, and watch her swim and run. Meanwhile he was no slim-jim himself, but it never occurred to us then that a man should reduce. You look back and things seem obvious, but at the time you’re being hypnotized every step of the way.
    Gladys didn’t mind. He was her hero absolutely, and nobody could say a bad word about her father, including me. She was a little like him, you didn’t want to push any wrong buttons. So I just swallowed up everything I thought about the man and when we talked at night and she said something about how fine Daddy was I’d say, “Uh-huh.”
    So when James came on the scene, when Gladys was only seventeen, my father at first told her no, she could not see a man who was twenty-two, he was too old for her, and he had a child.
    â€œYou’ll regret it, dammit, you don’t want to be mother to some other woman’s child!”
    â€œHow do you know what I want?” Gladys said that night. The two of them were on the front porch, on the swing. I was on the steps. My mother was in her own little world out there in the garden, suffering, I think now. I remember Gladys saying, “How do you know what I want?” because it wasn’t her habit to snap at him like that, and the way she said it was a real snap crackle pop.
    For a long time he was quiet. You could hear the sound of my mother’s shears snipping in the garden.
    â€œI suppose I don’t know what you want. Suppose I never did,” my father finally said, and then he gets up off the swing and walks inside. I turn and watch him walk through the light of the doorway, a big man in his work boots, and secretly I’m thrilled his feelings got hurt.
    The squeak of the chains is all I hear now. Gladys is swinging on the swing with her arms crossed. It’s quiet, and I wanted to say something but I just could never figure out what to say. Then the swinging stops and there’s a stillness, and all the sudden Gladys is crying, crying hard, like I never heard her cry before.
    I stood up and walked over to her. “Gladys?”
    She said through her crying, “Get away from me!”
    So I did.
    And by the time of her wedding day, which my father did attend, Gladys and him weren’t talking. He walked her up the aisle of the small white Baptist church none of us had ever set our heathen feet in; he wore a suit and had his hair slicked down and walked tall, but they hadn’t talked to each other in over two months.
    I cried my eyes out at that wedding. People cry at weddings, especially young girls, so nobody thought a thing. They thought, Sweet Ivy. Sweet Ivy is so happy for her sister. But I was crying with a dark heart. Watching my father hand her over like a present to James, I knew the future of our house. I knew my father would disappear. He wouldn’t know how to live in the house with Gladys gone. I wouldn’t miss him, exactly, I’d miss who he’d never been, some father who never was. I wouldn’t see him for a long time. He wouldn’t even show up at my wedding.
    Gladys and Jimmy would just ride away with Wendell. My mother and I would be left behind. She wouldn’t know what hit her. She’d