What Once We Loved Read Online Free PDF

you,” she said, and he melted into her, then turned so his back nestled against her breast. She kissed the top of his head. “Let me hold my boy,” she said. He made the signfor more then, her arms still wrapped around him, and she felt him nod and grunt, then she kissed his head again. The dog panted and yipped. “He's making that sign, Suzanne. And he's smiling. But no bigger than you.”

    Crescent City, on the California Coast
    The salt spray forced Tipton Wilson Kossuth to pull the shawl tighter around her slender shoulders. Sunset usually promised a wind and a chill, but she didn't want to go inside just yet. The ball of red sinking on the horizon still felt warm against her face, and she found she could think more clearly at the shore.
    Nehemiah, her husband, was a good man. Everyone said so. So she didn't know why this recent request annoyed her so. He rarely asked a thing of her that wasn't reasonable. Maybe that was it. He was always so…reasonable, telling her things “for her own good” as though his sixteen more years of living gave him some superior right to tell her what to expect, how to behave. Her mother was always telling her what to do. Her brother, Charles, gave his advice freely, when she couldn't avoid his presence. Now she had a husband who thought it his duty to educate her mind and soul…and body. She shoved that thought aside. She would be seventeen in less than a month. She guessed she knew a few things about living, about how a young wife was supposed to behave.
    She bent to pick up a clear stone. An agate. She'd have one of her own to show him. He'd like that, though she supposed he knew about this beach full of them. He was always talking about the pretty rocks he picked up on his journey inland to Oregon when he brought supplies for the mining communities growing there. “An entire agate desert lies in the shadow of two strange land formations people in Jacksonville call Table Rocks.”
    Some days she felt as though she lived in a desert too, nothing more than a shiny object her husband polished toward perfection. At least Tipton had made her mother happy. Tipton sniffed. Her mother would say she'd made a good marriage with a man both kind and aspiring. Hadn't he recovered his assets after being wiped out by a fire? Hadn't he already arranged financing for warehouses that stocked his pack string? And he spoke more openly now about running for political office. Everyone Tipton met said he should. They needed a good representative from this northern end of Klamath County. And everyone treated the Kossuths as though they'd always belonged at this far reach of the world shadowed by transport and timber.
    So what was wrong with her? She quickened her pace, her linsey-woolsey skirt whipping around her high-top boots. Tipton glanced toward the shore. No Indians. Nehemiah warned her that the Takelmas and Klamaths and other bands weren't as friendly as those who had helped them on their journey across from Wisconsin to California. Little sandpipers quickstepped against the foam that left a line as thin as lace against the sand. It was hard to keep everything straight in a new place. She didn't like the strong winds or the sudden weather changes either, changes that could take a dark, distant skyline to the heavy fog.
    Sometimes the fog stayed out there, something she could see but didn't feel at all. Other times, it moved in to cover the land the way laudanum crept over her when she took it to soothe a hurt. She knew it would arrive to make the world hazy and slow, just not when or for how long.
    She'd told Nehemiah about the ocean storms, especially the fog and how it chilled her, made her want to sink inside the cabin and stay a month.
    “I'd have thought someone with such dramatic inclinations would enjoy the vagaries of the ocean,” Nehemiah told her, “being so similar in temperament.” Her husband was gentle in his saying of it, held her to him with one big arm as their boots sank in