The Cast Stone Read Online Free PDF Page B

out the missing humour. “I’m not bad.” She put down her beadwork. “How’s Lester?”
    â€œI’m standin’ here.”
    â€œI can see that.”
    â€œI mean, they never broke me, I’m still on my feet.”
    â€œI can see that.”
    â€œI made it. I made it home again.” Lester put one foot up on the first step, so that he stood at a slight angle to Rosie, so that he could deflect any possible attack.
    Rosie sat squarely in front of Ben’s door, protective. “So what brought you back here?”
    â€œIt’s home, I guess. Nowhere else for me to go.”
    â€œI was just wondering ’cause you don’t have any family here anymore.”
    â€œDon’t have family anywhere I guess.” Lester looked around, then looked back up towards Rosie again. “I guess you’re about all the family I got Rose.” He closed his mouth firmly at the end of her name and stood there, with his mouth clamped shut so that his chin protruded. He looked strong, standing there with his hands tucked neatly away in his hip pockets, one foot on the step and his chin forward. Strong, and resolved, not begging. “Here I am; take it or leave it,” his body language spoke.
    At that particular angle with the light filtered by pine, Rosie saw the resemblance between Lester and his mother. It was in the oval of the face and the proportions of cheekbone, chin, and brow.
    â€œHave you eaten?” Rosie began gathering up her sewing. She would take him into her home. She was all the family that he had left and a cousin could never be turned away hungry, no matter what kind of a cousin he had been.
    She was thinking about her Aunt Ester as she fried up the last few pieces of chicken. Ester had only been a few years older than Rosie, a young aunt, young enough that there were a few occasions that they had played together. Aunt Ester sitting with her little niece and putting dolls to bed. When they were a bit older but still young enough to be just playing, Rosie remembered Ester at parties, dances and laughter.
    Then Lester was born and Rosie saw less and less of Ester. Then came Rosie’s children and she saw even less of her young aunt and her hard working husband and their house on the other side of the village. She had seen Lester occasionally as he grew up.
    She glanced his way. He looked almost swallowed by the large over-soft couch as he tried to figure out the remote control for the television. Rosie liked that couch. It fit her. It clearly did not fit Lester.
    Where did he fit? Anywhere? She wondered how he had fit in at the penitentiary. Maybe that was the place for people like Lester. Maybe, who knows? Maybe he changed. Maybe in all that time locked away he had gotten over being mean. Somehow Rosie doubted it, not the power of an institution to affect change, but that anything could ever be done to take the meanness out of Lester. He seemed to have been born that way. Rosie remembered comments that followed him around the community and now resurfaced in her mind a quarter-century later. The voice of an old man, an Elder spoke clearly in her memory again. “He didn’t get that way from either of his parents. He brought that with him when he came here.”
    Rosie scraped the chicken from the splattering grease, careful not to leave anything stuck to the pan. The trick to brown chicken is in the turning. Rosie took pride in her ability to cook. It was something that she did well even, as was often, with very little to work with.
    It made Rosie hungry to watch Lester eat. She left him at the kitchen table and took a cup of tea into the living room and visited with her friend the television. There wasn’t enough chicken for both of them. Oh well, it wouldn’t hurt her any to miss a meal now and then. She could call it dieting. She was happy that at this time of the day there were fewer food commercials, not like Saturday mornings when junk