Yesterday's Embers Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t want to get used to it.
    He held his daughter to his chest, even while she struggled, and rocked her the way he’d seen Kaye do. After a while she stopped fighting him, her sobs changing to stuttered whiffs. The sound did something to him. Paralyzed him. How would they ever make it without Kaye?
    There was no way by himself that he could keep the farm afloat, keep his pressroom job, keep the kids fed and clothed.
    His strength drained out of him, and he held on to the baby as if she might somehow support him.
     
    K ayeleigh lay flat on her back, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned languidly overhead. Languidly . She’d come across the word in the library book she’d been reading before turning out the lamp tonight. For once she hadn’t hurried over the sentence, trying to figure it out in context. It wasn’t a word they’d had in seventh-grade spelling yet, so she’d gone to Dad’s computer to look it up. Drooping, sluggish, listless, flagging . Then she’d had to look up flagging . She hated it when the dictionary used one hard-to-understand word to define another. Tonight, at least, it kept her from thinking about Mom and Rachel.
    She rolled over on her side. In the matching double bed on the opposite side of the room, she heard the twins’ even breaths. But the empty space beside her felt like a black hole. Rachel’s side of the bed.
    Grandma said they should talk about what happened. Remember stories about Mom and Rachel so they’d never forget them. Like that was going to happen. Sometimes she wished she could forget. It hurt too much to keep remembering. Most of the time she didn’t know who tocry for. When she thought about Rachel and sobbed for her, she felt like she was betraying Mom. And when she cried over Mom, she worried that Rachel would feel jealous. It helped a little to picture them together in heaven. At least they weren’t lonely up there.
    Or were they? She still had Dad and Landon and her other sisters down here, but if anything, that made what had happened seem worse. It killed her to see the faraway look in Dad’s eyes, to never see him smile. To see Landon curling up into himself. To hear the twins constantly asking questions about Mom and heaven.
    Could Mom see them from up there? She couldn’t be happy in heaven if she saw how sad they all were down here.
    She wondered if Mom had remembered her birthday. Nobody else had. Kayeleigh Jane DeVore had turned twelve three days ago, and still no presents or balloons or the usual birthday girl treatment Mom had always been in charge of. Grandma brought over a card with a check for ten dollars, and Dad had pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and handed it to her the morning of her birthday.
    Maybe there’d been a big celebration in heaven. Mom always said the angels in heaven had a party when it was your birthday. But it would have been nice to have a cake down here.
    A noise from downstairs made her sit straight up in bed. Harley. Crying for Mommy. Kayeleigh held her breath, waiting. Dad would get up with her.
    She put a pillow over her ears and drifted back to sleep. But a few minutes later, she started awake to a low-pitched wail. Harley was still crying. Why wasn’t Dad getting her? He had to hear her. The crib was two feet from his bed.
    She slid from beneath the quilts and sat on the edge of the mattress. The moon outside the second-story window cast a wedge of light on the wood floor, and Kayeleigh followed its path, picking her way through the maze of stuffed animals and Barbie dolls littering the floor.
    She tiptoed down the stairs, avoiding the places where the old stepscreaked. But there was no need to tiptoe. Harley was crying loud enough to wake up the whole house.
    Crossing the living room, she tried not to think about the empty corner where the Christmas tree should have stood. They’d always put up their tree the Sunday after Thanksgiving. She knew there would be no tree this year. No Christmas. She