Tending to Virginia Read Online Free PDF Page B

married twice and I had a baby and I’ve still got that money-eating baby all grown into a scrawny teenager who thinks he’s something.”
    “Please don’t ever tell.” Virginia grabbed her arm and held it. “Please don’t ever.”
    “Relax, Ginny Sue. Who would I tell, the old folks? Emily and Lena don’t even know who they are half the time.”
    “Yes, they do.”
    “Well, I’m not even going to argue that one. But really, who am I going to tell? Your mama?” Cindy laughed. “Hannah would say I was lying because ‘Ginny Sue would have told something like that’ and I sure as hell wouldn’t tell my mama who would say I had made it up just to make you look like you’d picked a wrong number like I’ve done twice. I wish I did have somebody to tell but I don’t.”
    “Please, just don’t tell.” Virginia caught herself begging just like all the other times she had confided in Cindy. Cindy wouldn’t really tell; she would just mention it every chance she got to let Virginia know that she was over a barrel.
    “Okay. Thanks for the dresses. Don’t ever tell that you gave themto me. I don’t want Mama or anybody to know that you gave me these.” Cindy laughed and looked like a little imp with that punk hairdo and upturned nose.
    Virginia strikes a match and breathes in on that dried-out Virginia Slims and feels sick. But she’s going to smoke it, sit right on that porch and smoke it to the filter just like Lena does. She wishes Cindy could see her now. Cindy can get away with murder: married, divorced, married, divorced, looking for a third and all anybody ever says is “doesn’t surprise me,” whereas Virginia can’t get away with anything, never has been able to. It isn’t envy that she feels for Cindy because certainly she would not trade places for that soap opera life and she wouldn’t want that streak of wildness Cindy has that came from God only knows where. As children the difference had been easy enough to pinpoint: Cindy had that French provincial room and the Madame Alexander dolls; she had that vanity table covered with perfumes and makeup before she was old enough to wear it. On her sixteenth birthday, Cindy’s father bought her that baby blue Mustang convertible which Cindy drove to Clemmonsville every Friday night to buy beer while Madge and Raymond thought she was at the movies or at the library. “Goody two shoes,” Cindy always said to her. “Won’t even ride to Clemmonsville with your own cousin.”
    What? What is it about Cindy that makes her feel so lifeless, so predictable? They’d all be surprised if they could see Virginia right now, puffing away on that Virginia Slims with her nightshirt hiked up and her legs spread apart the way that Cindy always sits and it doesn’t surprise a soul when Cindy sits that way. She wishes she could name her baby Latoya Montreal Canada Ballard if she wanted to, because Cindy could. Cindy could have named Chuckie, Dirt Britches Snipes and no one would have batted an eye. If Mark was Cindy’s husband and had told her all about Sheila, Cindy would have said, “Thank God, I’d hate to have to think that it was going to visit me over the summer because that first wife of yours, slut that she is, would have ruined a child.” And maybe that’s what she envies about Cindy, saying whatever pops into her mind, though it is still amystery where Cindy got that—Madge, so quiet and withdrawn and Uncle Raymond so methodical and calculated and crazy right down to killing himself. It makes Virginia squinch her eyes just to think of Uncle Raymond, to think of how crazy he must have been. She didn’t cry at the funeral or afterwards while Cindy was putting on a spectacle, which surprised no one, and Cindy’s sister, Catherine, was talking to a woman about getting her tubes tied and Madge was standing out in the backyard as stiff and silent as the huge oak tree where Chuckie was digging a hole.
    Virginia tosses the filter to the concrete and