The House on Persimmon Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

extraordinary green eyes.
    Justine Hale, he thought, you had the whole world to choose from. Why’d you have to move into mine?
    —  •  —
    Justin sat on the steps and watched the moving van depart. It had Virginia plates, a reminder of her past life. It had been a good life, too…once.
    The van picked up speed. A trail of red dust obscured the tags, obscured her final link with the kind of life she’d never know again.
    She would be in shock yet, she supposed, if reality had not slapped her in the face.
    She had learned all too quickly that a single-income household could not live as if there were still two. In spite of her share of the profit from the sale of the house, her bank balance threatened to shrivel like a grape in the sun.
    Only moments ago she had debated how much to tip the movers. Six months ago she would’ve been far too generous. Financial reality was that she could no longer afford generosity. It was a humbling experience.
    Even more humbling had been her efforts to borrow money against her share of the house until it sold. That had scared her.
    The credit application had been the first she had filled out since the divorce. Single. Separated. Married. Widowed. Divorced. It had taken all the strength she could muster to mark the box, Divorced.
    She had become a statistic, labeled as abandoned and unloved. She had two children to raise and no credit of her own. The loan had been turned down.
    Sadly, her circle of friends had shriveled, too.
    If divorce could happen to Justine, they said, it could happen to anybody. They didn’t like being reminded. Invitations dwindled into nothing.
    So now they didn’t have to be reminded. She was eight hundred miles away.
    She reached for her purse and extracted a cigarette. Except for the occasional puff, she had stopped smoking years before, when she’d become pregnant with Pip. She’d only taken the habit up again when Philip had started talking about becoming a monk. It was a terrible habit, but she had convinced herself that cigarettes were cheaper than doctors and buckets of Valium. Once her life was back on track, she’d quit again. Right now she needed something to hold her ragged nerves together. Nicotine was it.
    The smell of tobacco wafting into the great room through the opened windows lured Lottie onto the porch. I used to smoke a bit, myself, she said conversationally. I do miss having a pipe of an evening. We used to grow the finest golden tobacco hereabouts. Elmer had a special way of curing the leaves. Mild, our tobacco was. A man came up every year from New Orleans to buy it. Said it made a cigar to rival that from the islands. Got a good price, too.
    ’Course, once the war started, nobody came. The last crop just cured until it rotted. A terrible waste, that was.
    The heavy scent of smoke hung about Lottie like an invisible fog. She inhaled and noted precisely where in the purse Justine placed her cigarettes.
    Oh, for the day she’d be flesh and bone again, Lottie thought. She longed for so much. Not riches, just the simple, everyday pleasures of life.
    Before the new tenants had arrived, the balance of eternity stretched before her like a vacuous gauntlet, its torture being the promise of hours linked by boredom. Now that was all changed.
    Lottie wished there was a way to let Justine know how welcome she was in her home. The expression on Justine’s face was sad. There was a line of perspiration on her brow. You’re too young to appear so downhearted, Lottie advised. Why, when I got word that Elmer had been killed, I went straight out to the fields and worked past sundown. Slept good that night too. So get up. Get busy. That always worked for me.
    “Justine!”
    “I’m on the porch, Mother Hale.”
    Agnes emerged, her mouth turned down in annoyance. “There aren’t any clothes closets. Not one!”
    “Well, the house is older than I thought if it predates closets. We’ll just have to use chests of drawers and chifforobes. I’m