Sweet Everlasting Read Online Free PDF Page A

read. “Poor Ty, don’t pay her any mind. And count your blessings—you’re safe in your ‘backwoods hamlet,’ but here I am at home, getting an improving lecture every day! I love you and I miss you, and I’ll write you a real letter soon, I promise! Love and kisses, Abbey.”
    Chuckling, Tyler got up to pour himself a cup of coffee. His mother dominated his sister as much as she tried to dominate him, but for some reason Abbey had never chafed under Carolivia’s authoritarianism the way he had. She’d kept her sense of humor, rarely confronted their mother head-on, and consequently managed to get her own way and a tranquil house much more often than he had when he’d been her age—twenty. For him the solution had been to defy his mother at every opportunity. He’d known no other way to stay whole—the alternative would have been to let her swallow him up like a minnow. Or so it had seemed to him then, in his rash youth; now that he was a man, he hoped he’d stopped making major life decisions by calculating the opposite of what his mother wanted him to do.
    He hoped—but sometimes he wondered. He couldn’t deny that enlisting in the First United States Volunteer Cavalry as a private had appealed to him in part because he’d known it would drive his mother wild. But that hadn’t been the only reason. Like everyone else, he’d gotten caught up in the jingoistic ardor of the moment, and it had been easy to see himself as a dashing hero, off to save the Cuban peasants and drive the Spanish out of our hemisphere once and for all. In the Rough Riders he’d been one of Roosevelt’s “gentleman rankers,” Ivy League enlistees in Brooks Brothers uniforms, recruited to give the regiment the proper “tone.” No one had earned his commission without merit, though, and the Yale and Princeton Knickerbockers had ridden and fought side by side with leathery, foulmouthed cowboys and Indian scouts. It had been a glorious little war: short, decisive, and satisfying—to anyone who hadn’t fought in it. The last thing young, healthy, idealistic Tyler Wilkes had expected from it was a crippling wound and a long, devastating illness in its aftermath.
    Setting up a medical practice in Wayne’s Crossing the following year hadn’t been an act of defiance at all, regardless of what his mother believed. He’d been too enervated for defiance; he’d moved here out of inertia, not resolve. Ill and depressed, he’d come across an advertisement in the back of a medical journal for a retiring M.D.’s practice in a “small but prosperous town in sylvan setting.” After an amazingly brief exchange of letters with Benjamin M. Stoneman, M.D., he’d bought the practice, sight unseen, for the sum of $1000. Now that he’d seen it, a thousand dollars seemed low; he had more patients than he could handle, and the home and office were small but perfectly adequate to his needs. But what he knew now was that Dr. Benjamin Stoneman had sold out cheap because he didn’t expect to retire: he expected to die.
    Would Stoneman pay a call this evening? Ty wondered. When the old doctor wasn’t suffering from insomnia, he was plagued with drenching night sweats, both symptomatic of his consumption, and the two conditions were sufficiently aggravating to keep him prowling around most nights until midnight or later. He probably wouldn’t come tonight, though; the snow was wet and heavy, deepening by the hour, and Stoneman’s tubercular chest “tightened up” on him in damp weather. Usually Tyler looked forward to his visits, even though they had little in common, professionally speaking, beyond the rudimentary fact that they were both M.D.’s. Stoneman was of the old school; he hadn’t studied, he’d read medicine forty years ago, and in Ty’s opinion his ideas hadn’t changed much since then. He didn’t own a microscope, hadn’t kept up with any of the astounding advances in epidemiology or bacteriology of the last decade, and he