Substitute for Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

explosion while working on a research project on alternative energy sources. Holly had vivid memories of her vivacious mother, but they had softened with time and love. No amount of concentration would make the colors bright again. It struck her then that she was the same age her mother had been when she’d been born. Her mother had been a relative rarity twenty-six years ago: a never-married woman with a child. Her mother told her that getting pregnant had been an accident but finding out she was going to have a baby had been one of the happiest moments in her life. She never told Holly who her father was and Holly hadn’t been old enough to yearn for that knowledge by the time her mother died.
    A live electrical source, supposed by everyone to be disconnected, had sparked, igniting a tank of compressed natural gas. Her mother and six other lab workers were instantly killed in the explosion, and three more people died in the resulting fire. That night, Holly had moved from the only house she remembered living in, but Aunt Zinnia only lived six blocks away. Grandmother Rose had been failing, and although Great-Aunt Daisy was much healthier, she had never learned to drive. Everyone agreed that sooner or later, Holly would need to be driven somewhere. Aunt Zinnia, a comfortable widow six years older than her dead sister, was the only one who could take her in and give her a relatively normal childhood and adolescence. Within weeks she was transferred from her mother’s to her aunt’s choice of school and nothing was the same except for the familiar neighborhood.
    Aunt Zinnia married Uncle Bernard a year later. He was a silent, withdrawn man who found it easier to work long hours as an accountant than to face his wife’s caustic tongue. Holly might have found in him an ally, because misery loves its own company, but he hardly spoke to her. He died almost two years to the day of the wedding. Aunt Zinnia barely grieved. Only now did Holly ask herself why they had married when love seemed so clearly not a part of the equation.
    For a long time she thought she was the problem. Uncle Bernard didn’t like it when Aunt Zinnia slapped her, that had been evident. But he never spoke up about it. Only once, she remembered, when her aunt had been telling her how clumsy she was, Uncle Bernard said vaguely, “Leave the girl alone, Zinnia.”
    As she grew older, she was aware that her aunt’s harsh discipline had stemmed from an abiding disagreement with her dead sister about what decent women do and don’t do. Decent women attend college, but they don’t get advanced degrees, and certainly not in something as unfeminine as organic sciences. College, Aunt Zinnia told Holly time and again, was for finding a suitable husband. Barring that, it should provide a useful skill for a woman to fall back on, like teaching or nursing.
    Her mother had gone to college but had refused perfectly acceptable suitors, then decided to have a child, on her own. Aunt Zinnia had been determined that Holly would not follow in her mother’s footsteps.
    The lectures, deprivations, spankings and slaps hadn’t, in the end, had much success. Holly pursued a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and moved in with Clay when she was nineteen, and decent women didn’t do either of those things.
    Clay said that Holly wasted a lot of energy maintaining some semblance of an adult relationship with Aunt Zinnia, and he didn’t really understand why she kept trying. He had serious differences with his own parents and saw them only at family events, and never with Holly along. She found it harder to walk away from people. She knew she didn’t want Aunt Zinnia’s acknowledgment that her parenting had been cruel and unfeeling most of the time — she didn’t need it. She supposed that she kept up contact because Aunt Zinnia would sometimes, reluctantly, speak of sister Lily, and Holly would feel close to her mother for a few minutes.
    Jumping over puddles, she made it to