Sunshine and Shadows Read Online Free PDF

his knee.
    He bent down to scratch her behind the ears. Poor old Hildy was getting along in years. He could remember the days when she used to come bounding out of her doghouse at the sound of his key in the lock and plant her big paws in the middle of his chest to welcome him. Often as not, her greeting would include a loud slurpy kiss. Nowadays, she was hard of hearing and barely managed to wag her tail when she saw him.
    What would he do when she was gone and there was no more Hildy to greet him at the gate? He didn't like to think about it. The truth was, his town house smelled of loneliness—a smell of too many store-bought frozen dinners and rooms left closed all day to incubate a faintly doggy smell.
    "Hildy, old girl, how about some chow?" He let them both in the front door, and she waited eagerly as he poured kibble into a dish beside the kitchen closet where she slept when she stayed inside.
    He wasn't hungry. The meal he'd eaten in the dining hall had been delicious, and it had seemed to be a hit with the people of Yahola, too. He was glad that the mission had decided to hire a dietitian and to start a meal program. Some of the kids in school had a hard time concentrating on their lessons, and he knew the reason was that they didn't get enough to eat at home.
    Lisa didn't look like the type to isolate herself at a nowhere kind of place at the edge of the 'Glades where her coworkers would be nuns and where poor families predominated. She looked as if she'd be more comfortable in classier surroundings.
    But perhaps she wasn't what she appeared to be. Some of the things she'd said tonight made him think that maybe she felt the same way about the mission as he did, which was probably impossible. He had begun his association with the mission out of atonement, but he continued it out of love.
    The first time he'd ever driven to Yahola, he'd been overwhelmed. First of all, the camp was in a wilderness dominated by water. Silent water, slipping through the saw grass toward the sea; lazy water, green with algae, lapping at the sides of the canals on both sides of the road; water that weltered out of the sky in great thunderstorms, the likes of which he'd never experienced anywhere else in Florida or in Tennessee, the only other state where he'd ever lived.
    Then there were the nuns at the mission, exceptional women who were devoted to the migrant children with a passion that burned so strong that he was in awe. And of course there were the kids, who were the main reason for the mission's existence in the first place. He had grown to love the children, two hundred or more of them, whose lives and futures held little good fortune and even less promise.
    Of course, Sister Maria disagreed. "Many of them will succeed in ways that their parents have not. If we enable just one to finish high school, to go to college, to find hope in the midst of despair—then we have succeeded," she'd told him.
    At first Jay didn't know if it was possible to change the courses of the migrant children's lives even with the single-minded devotion of the dedicated Sisters of Perpetual Faith. He only knew that art could make a difference and that self-expression was an outlet for young people who had no other way of getting their feelings out in the open. In this he was no less dedicated than the good sisters.
    He could have been a partner in a busy Palm Beach law firm after he graduated from the University of Tennessee law school, but he'd turned down the offer. Instead, he now shared a partnership and a cramped office with another up-and-coming young lawyer, and their office was by no means located in the best area of Jupiter. He made enough money to support himself, and his practice was growing. The growth worried him. He didn't ever want to give up his work at Faith Mission School or renege on his commitment to Connie, his prize pupil.
    The first time Jay had seen Connie Fernandez in class, she was tightly gripping a blue crayon and concentrating