Daughters-in-Law Read Online Free Page B

kitchen was full of them and they were all always so starving.”
    “I can’t ask her anything,” Anthony said, “until she speaks.”
    Rachel put a finger into the sauce to taste it.
    “Perhaps she’ll do for Ralph. He doesn’t speak much, either.”
    “He wouldn’t accept any choice of ours—”
    “Probably not. Is she pretty?”
    Anthony thought.
    “Yes—”
    “You sound doubtful.”
    “Well, she’s not Sigrid kind of pretty. She’s not—not
organized
-looking—”
    “Okay,” Rachel said, spooning the pesto into a pottery dish they had brought back from a bird-watching holiday in Sicily. “When she speaks and you like how she sounds, ask her here anyway. I could do with more young.”
    “I know.”
    “D’you remember that poem? ‘How Can That Be My Baby’?”
    “Pam Ayres.”
    “Yes. Well, that’s me. ‘What happened to his wellies with the little froggy eyes.’”
    A month later, Petra spoke. Anthony had been talking to the class about the importance of never having an eraser—“Keep going, as fast as the bird moves. Soft pencils, 4B to 6B, pencil sharpener vital but no eraser. Never”—and Petra had looked up and said in a voice presumably hoarse from lack of use, “Is the angle of the bird’s body more important than its outline?”
    The whole class had turned to look at her.
    “We thought you was mental,” a boy two seats away said to her, not unkindly.
    Petra went on looking at Anthony for an answer.
    “Yes,” Anthony said.
    Petra glanced at the boy two seats away. Then she looked back at Anthony.
    “That’s what I thought,” she said, and went back to her drawing.
    Two weeks later, Anthony said to the class, “I wonder if you would all like to come and see my studio?”
    It was evident that they all would, and had no idea how to say so.
    “Good,” Anthony said. He smiled. “All of you?” They nodded. He looked at Petra. “Even you?”
    “Yes,” she said, and then, “Please.”
    They came on the local bus, as exotic-looking as a troupe of Shakespearean traveling players. Petra was wearing small, studious-looking steel-framed spectacles, and her hair hung down her back, almost to her waist, over a paisley shawl and purple Turkish trousers gathered at the ankle.
    “I’m not going to ask your names,” Rachel said, “because I won’t remember any of them. But I’m Rachel and he’s Anthony, and those are scones I’ve just made, and that’s a chocolate cake. Obviously.”
    The food released them. They ate with the focused concentration of babies, and then they began to talk. Anthony let them into the studio, and they all gasped and began to chatter and point things out to one another, and Rachel said to Petra, “Do you go bird-watching?”
    Petra took her spectacles off. Her eyes were greenish, with a definite dark rim to the iris.
    “Not really—”
    “Well, you should,” Rachel said. “Anthony thinks very highly of your drawing, but you need to observe, like he does.”
    Petra nodded.
    “What about your family? Does anyone in your family draw?”
    Petra cleared her throat.
    “I don’t really have a family—”
    “Oh,” Rachel said. She waited a moment, and then she said, “Meaning?”
    “It all kind of fell apart,” Petra said.
    “Fell apart?”
    “My mother died and my father went, ages ago. And now my grandmother’s gone to Canada.”
    “Why did she do that?”
    “Because most of her grandchildren are there. I suppose.”
    “Leaving you all alone?” Rachel demanded.
    “It’s okay,” Petra said. “We weren’t close. I’ve got somewhere to live.”
    Rachel looked at her intently.
    “What are you doing in Anthony’s art class?”
    “It’s what I want,” Petra said. “I work in a football-club bar weekends, and a coffee place weekdays except my college day.”
    “How old are you?”
    “Twenty,” Petra said. She put her spectacles back on. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m used to fending for myself.”
    Later that evening,