The Promise Read Online Free PDF Page A

a big hole in the plaster and insert a plastic anchor. When the picture fell, it yanked the anchor right out of the wall. She looked around on the floor till she found it. The anchor had slid all the way down the hall onto the welcome mat by the front door.
    She set the picture down and picked up the anchor. It was all bent and twisted. There was no way it would go back in that hole. And the plaster around the hole had split, making the hole too big, even if she could find another anchor somewhere in the garage.
    She dreaded the thought, but she’d have to tell Tom about this when he got home from work.
    Tom loved this portrait almost as much as she hated it. It wasn’t the picture inside so much as the whole look of it thatshe disliked. They’d had an argument over it the first week they moved into the house five years ago.
    Before they’d moved in, Tom had promised she would be in charge of decorating the house. He’d take care of the landscaping and everything in the garage, she’d get to make all the calls inside. Things had gone smoothly until she proudly showed him the family picture wall she’d created in the hallway.
    Her family always had one growing up. Tom’s did too. Family photos of all different shapes and sizes, people and places arranged just so on the hallway walls next to the stairs. On one side, the family pictures from the past—a few of Tom and her as kids, their parents, some pics of their siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
    The opposite wall was mostly empty . . . for now. Just a few 8-by-10s from their wedding day. The idea was to fill this wall with pictures of their family in the years to come. To Jean, it was perfect. Just the way it was.
    Tom had taken one look at the family picture wall and said, “Where is it?” He wasn’t smiling.
    Somehow she knew which picture he meant but pretended not to. “What do you mean?”
    â€œYou know what I’m talking about. Where is it?”
    â€œThere’s no room for it, Tom. You can see that. The whole wall is filled up.”
    â€œThen we need to make some room. I want that portrait on this wall. Where is it?”
    It was time to take a stand. “Whatever happened to ‘I’m in charge of the outside, and you get to be in charge of the inside’?”
    â€œYou are in charge of the inside,” he said. “But this isn’t a decorating decision. You get to decide where it goes on the wall, not whether it goes up there at all.” He sighed, the way he did when he was trying to tone down the edge in his voice. “Jean, that portrait is important to me. You know that. I can’t believeyou thought you could leave it out. It’s the only picture of my grandfather, my dad, and me together. The only one.”
    She did know that. She knew it then and she knew it now, standing there in the hallway alone.
    She looked at the picture again. Tom was only four years old at the time, maybe six months older than Tommy was now. He was sitting on his grandfather’s knee; his own father, Jim, stood behind them, his hands resting on his father’s shoulders. Although the crack ran right through the faces of the three Anderson men, she could still see the resemblance between Tom and their sweet little son, especially the way he smiled.
    Part of the reason she didn’t like the portrait was that Tom was the only one in the picture who was smiling. Jim, her father-in-law, and Tom’s grandfather both stared straight ahead with stern looks on their faces, like people did back in the 1800s. Jean had heard that the two older Anderson men barely got along. Maybe that had something to do with it. But why couldn’t they set their differences aside and smile for a family portrait?
    She’d asked Tom about it several times, but he didn’t know the answer and he kept forgetting to ask his father about it. She might have been able to look past the serious