The Good Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page B

know we’d be friends,” she told me once. Later, when Dinah took up with a younger man, Burt Reynolds, I found a copy of the National Enquirer at the bottom of my mother’s sewing basket, with a photograph of Burt and Dinah on the front. Whatever my mother made of that one, she never said.
    My mother’s only real-life friend (not counting Val Dickerson, and Val Dickerson could not be counted) was Nancy Edmunds, wife of our insurance agent, who lived down the road. The two of them got together for coffee—not often, because my mother was always busy with the chores, but every now and then. Nancy liked to do hair, and though my mother would never have paid money to visit a beauty parlor, she let Nancy give her a permanent wave once,and another time (this was long after, when they both must have been nearing fifty) Nancy dyed my mother’s hair. It came out jet black, and if the objective had been to make her look younger—to cover the gray—the experiment failed.
    “You were just fine the way you were, Connie,” my father said, when he saw the results. The closest to a compliment I ever heard out of him, perhaps, though you might say it was just the opposite, and said less about how good she’d looked before the hair dye than how odd she had looked after.
    A few years before this, around the time the oldest of the Edmunds kids and I were entering high school, it was discovered that Nancy’s husband, Ralph—our agent with Granite State for as long as my father had run the farm—had been embezzling money from the company. Next thing you knew, Ralph Edmunds disappeared.
    A week later it turned out he’d taken a train to Las Vegas, in the hopes that he might win back everything he’d lost, but that wasn’t what happened. They found him at some motel next to a casino, hanging from the shower rod, with a note on the bed addressed to Nancy, apologizing for ruining her life.
    Most people in our town stopped having much to do with Nancy and her kids after that, but my mother stuck by her friend, even after they lost their house and their car and Nancy Edmunds had to take a job at Perry’s Meat Market. My mother found some Bible verse that applied to the situation, she said, but really, I think, it was more the upbeat Dinah Shore philosophy than the scriptures that guided her. A person didn’t abandon her friend in hard times. That’s when they needed you most.

Dana
    Roots
    A FTER THE NEW Hampshire house was sold, we became renters, and we were always renters after that. This may explain why one of my earliest resolutions for my own life was that I would own a piece of land some day. What kind of structure might stand on it barely mattered, but soil did, and a deed of ownership. Roots.
    Val and George never cared about those things that much—though Val wanted one thing, which was a place to do her art. All those years, there was always paint under her fingernails and some picture in the works, though more often than not, when we moved, she’d have to leave her canvases behind. When she died, there was almost nothing to show of all those years she’d spent making those strange, sad pictures. They were of faces, mostly, and people she dreamed up, places that didn’t exist.
    As a young girl growing up in Pennsylvania, my mother had wanted to be an artist, but there was never any money for art school, and anyway, she told me once, her parents—her father worked at a steel mill; her mother kept house—didn’t think “artist” was a real job.
    She was working as a waitress in Pittsburgh when a man had given her his card. “With that long, thin figure of yours, you could be a model,” he told her—an old story, but not one she’d ever heard. “Call me if you come to New York City and I’ll set you up.”
    She didn’t care about modeling. But New York sounded good, and getting away from her parents sounded better. Uncle Ted fronted her a hundred dollars, and five days later she was on a bus to the big