The Best of Kristina Wright Read Online Free PDF Page A

Don’t put me in the ground like a potato.”
    She’d started to laugh, but had gone utterly still at the look in his eyes. “I promise, Eddie.”
    The wind kicked up, making her faded housedress flutter at her knees. Caroline shook her hair back once more, hair that she’d kept long for Ed. Kept long for him still.
    Stifling a groan from the ache in her knees, she knelt and carefully opened the four-pound box. Inside was another, smaller box. This one was sturdier, with a lid. She couldn’t see much in the moonlight, just grayish stuff in a dark box. It looked like sand, dirty sand. This was all that was left of Ed.
    She hadn’t thought about the logistics of it. Ed was always getting on her about not planning things out. “You jump feet first and measure the depth once you hit bottom,” he used to say. It was true. She’d had a month to think about this – longer really, if she were being honest with herself – but hadn’t worked out the details. Did she just dump the box out on the ground? That seemed disrespectful. And burying it defeated the purpose.
    She sighed and struggled back to her feet. She cursed the damn doctor who had changed her arthritis medicine. The new one didn’t work for shit, but the doctor had seemed so pleased with himself, he hadn’t asked her what she thought.
    “Damn men,” she said to the box.
    Ed had been the only man she’d ever loved, but he’d been a pain in the ass, too. He’d rejected alternative therapies as “voodoo”, turned down suggestions of experimental drugs. “I’m sixty-four and I hurt like a sumbitch,” he’d said when she’d begged him to consider something, anything, everything that might extend his life. “I’ve worked the farm since your dad hired me when I was sixteen. I’ve raised my kids, I’ve enjoyed my life. What else is there to live for?”
    The words stung as much now as they had then, nearly a year ago.
    “Me, you bastard,” she screamed, not caring if her voice carried across the prairie. “You had
me
to live for.”
    She spun, windmilling her arms, flinging Ed’s remains everywhere. The wind kicked up just then, as if in response to her anger, blowing the ashes back at her. Rough particles bit at her cheeks, stinging her, blinding her. She fell to her knees, sobbing. Ed’s ashes – though they weren’t really like ashes at all – clung to her hair, her tear-stained face, her housedress.
    “You had to have the last word, didn’t you?”
    She started to laugh then, great sobbing bellows of laughter that were neither “respectful” nor “ladylike”, two words her mother had beaten into her during her proper Baptist upbringing. She laughed until the tears, and Ed’s remains, dried on her cheeks.
    “Damn you, Ed Brindle,” she whispered, but the words held no fire.
    She remembered kneeling in this grass years ago and taking Ed in her mouth for the first time. They’d been married a month, but they’d been sneaking out here for three or four years. They hadn’t needed to sneak anymore, but they did. Every couple of months, Ed would give her that grin and lead her out to his truck, giving her a little goose as she climbed in. Even after the children came, they’d go out to the prairie in the warm months and fuck like rabbits.
    Ed would tease her the whole way about what he was going to do to her once he got her there and she’d tell him primly he’d do no such thing. She was lying, of course. She let him do anything he wanted. Now, kneeling in the dirt, she remembered that first night after they got married, the night Ed asked her to suck him.
    He’d kissed her senseless that night, his hand groping up under her dress, finding her wet through her cotton panties. She’d moaned into his mouth, humping his hand like a wild thing.
    He’d pulled back and she’d seen the desire in his expression. When he was like that, she almost didn’t recognize him. “You want me, don’t you, little one?”
    She nodded, afraid to