Promises of Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

short and curly. I’m not sure what he sees in that woman.”
    I shrugged. “Isn’t it awful, Davis? He hasn’t even started and we’re both already sure he’s going to fail again. I ought to have more faith in him.”
    Davis shook his head and adjusted his wire-rim glasses. “It’s hard to have faith in Ed’s entrepreneurial sense when you know his history.”
    I started to tell him about Junebug getting called away because of an emergency (this isn’t New York, and we don’t have that many emergencies on bright fall Friday mornings) when a tinkling bell announced the early arrival of my newest volunteer, Gretchen Goertz.
    Technically, Gretchen is my stepmother, in that she is married to my biological father. However, since most of Mirabeau still regards the late Lloyd Poteet as my dad, Gretchen being my stepmother is not a relationship I’d advertise. Neither would she. We just dislike each other too much. She resents my presence in her husband’s life and any attention and time he pays me. I take exception to the attempts she’s made to blacken my character and run me out of town. It’s a love-hate relationship in that we love to hate each other.
    Bob Don (despite his kindness to me, I still have trouble referring to him as “my father”) had come to me a couple of weeks back and suggested that Gretchen volunteer at the library. I’d sooner have invited Jack the Ripper to restock the crime shelf while Genghis Khan minded military history and Joseph Stalin handled psychopathology. But Bob Don pleaded with me.
    “I just hate that you and Gretchen don’t get along,” he had said in his most coaxing salesman’s voice, twisting the gaudy diamond ring on his right hand, “and I think if y’all worked together you’d understand each other. She’s trying, Jordy, to accept that you’re in my life. She’s been squeezingin a therapy session over in Bavary between her Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and she says it’s helping her deal with her anger.”
    “I think she’d like to deal with her anger by eviscerating me, Bob Don.”
    “Please, Jordy. I have never asked you for anything, but I am asking you to give her a chance.”
    I’d had to consider it, of course. Bob Don pays for my mother’s home health care, which keeps her out of a nursing home and prevents my pocketbook from being pirated. But aside from that—he is my father, and I felt I should endeavor to make the relationship work. I’d counted to ten and, forcing a smile, agreed on a preliminary basis. Anyway, I’d needed a new volunteer to replace Candace, who was resigning from the library to reopen the Sit-a-Spell. I’d just made sure I wore an athletic cup to work the first day Gretchen showed up. I figured she’d appear, grouse, and then I could dismiss her with a clear conscience.
    It hadn’t quite worked out that way. Gretchen, to my surprise, proved a conscientious worker and a quick study. Her only failing thus far was her nearly fanatical adherence to every letter of the rules (which I interpreted as I damn well pleased) and an occasional criticism of me, always couched in the most diplomatic and helpful language.
    The library’s not so big. With one glance Gretchen took in Old Man Renfro with an empty coffee cup at the periodicals, Bradley Foradory looking at a freshly cracked book, and me having a tete-a-tete with Davis instead of devising an improvement over the Library of Congress system. I could see her whole body frost in about one second.
    She stuck her head in my doorway. “Need any help?” she asked. I wondered if she’d left the front door open; seemed a little chillier in here all of a sudden.
    “No thanks, Gretchen,” I said.
    Davis stood, saying he had to go, but manners made him pause and inquire about my mother. I answered his questions briefly and politely; I know folks don’t like totalk about Alzheimer’s. They act like it’s catching. The niceties completed, he retrieved his son.
    “All right,