Small Sacrifices Read Online Free PDF Page B

could come of a call from a hospital. Wes had lost both his parents in a terrible car accident a decade earlier; Willadene had never again been able to hear a phone ring in the night without a stab of anxiety.
    She threw on clothes, not noticing what she wore, and joined her husband. The Fredericksons raced for the hospital. Wes realized just as he drove up to the emergency entrance that he had forgotten his false teeth.
    Wes Frederickson is an ascetically handsome man in his
    early fifties, who resembles Palmer Cortlandt, the millionaire-inresidence on the soap opera "All My Children." He was an important man in Springfield, the number-one man in the local branch of the U.S. Post Office: the Postmaster himself. It seemed inappropriate for him to appear in public without his teeth. He stopped the car, let Willadene out, and raced home to get his dentures.
    Willadene Frederickson was forty-six but she looked a decade older. Fortune's assaults had humbled her, making her bend nervously into the wind as if braced for her next catastrophe. She seemed a woman who expected trouble at any moment. Her
    lovely thick chestnut hair--still styled as it had been back in the fifties when she married Wes--was shot with gray. Willadene looked like what she once had been: a good, solid Arizona farmwoman.
    She stood alone and indecisive in the empty parking lot
    outside the emergency room. She sought a way into the waiting room, considered using the double doors, but was afraid they might be only for ambulance crews. She found a single door and talked into the corridor. Diane stood in front of the window to ^e nurses' station.
    "What happened?" Willadene gasped.
    Diane stared back at her mother, seemingly unable to respond. Judy Patterson spoke up. "The children have been shot."
    ^Shot?" Willadene echoed incredulously. "Shot?" road Tes'" Judy said softly-"^ght out in the middle of the
    --"Where?" m
    ^'Marcola." "S "Mar cola?"
    26 ANN RULE
    Willadene Frederickson could not comprehend what had hap. pened. She had seen Diane and the children only that afternoon. She'd looked after Danny all day as always, and the girls too when they came home from school. Usually, they all ate supper j together at her house, but she and Wes had had a meeting. Diane I had picked the children up after she finished work and had taken them home for supper. Everything had been fine then. Why on . earth would Diane and the children have been in Marcola? I Diane spoke up. "We were out to Mark and Heather's ..." Willadene could not remember who Mark and Heather were,
    or if she'd ever known them. That didn't matter at this point. She reached an arm out to her daughter. _
    Willadene and Diane walked into the large waiting room. J
    "Mom, I can't live without my kids." te f
    Willadene Frederickson did what she has always done; she tried to smooth things over. "Don't worry. They'll be all right." She patted Diane. "The children will be fine. They have very good doctors."
    That seemed to calm Diane a little. The two of them filled out forms that Judy Patterson gave them. Why were there always forms? What did it matter at a time like this? |
    No one told Diane or Willadene that Cheryl was dead. Nor would they let Diane see her children again. Neither woman could, of course, see the desperate struggle going on in the trauma room, but they were angry at being shunted aside. Diane had apparently blanked out the sight of her younger daughter lying as still as a broken doll behind the drapes because she said nothing about that to Willadene. Surely, she must know, the nurses thought. How could she not know? Afterward, Diane said she had no memory of seeing Cheryl in the hospital. "I never saw Cheryl until I saw her in her coffin."
    When a nurse or aide raced past for more blood or on some other errand, they called out to Diane and Willadene that the children were "serious," but alive. They meant Christ'e and Danny. ^pg •
    cfe^ J
    Wes Frederickson hurried into the waiting room. He