No Daughter of the South Read Online Free Page B

The woman who carefully constructed the life going on around me, with the comfortable apartment and the good meals and the music lessons and all those books, bore these three children to three different men. Men who apparently have no place in Sammy’s life now, because I’ve never heard any of them mentioned. By Sammy, anyway; I’d not been above asking Sarah one evening when we were alone together, only to find out they each had a different father whom they knew but didn’t see much. I was afraid to ask more, afraid that she’d realize how interested I was and mention it to Sammy who had managed to avoid giving anything away. Not a clue. As if it isn’t important.
    Of course, I blindly dismissed the possibility that she still saw the girls’ fathers. On the nights I wasn’t there, maybe they visited their daughters, and chatted with Sammy, and who knows, maybe even slept with her. Maybe they were better lovers than I was. Maybe one of them was the true love of her life. Still, I refused to consider it. Because if this were all true, would I have had cause to complain? No. Sammy would not have betrayed me. She would not have broken any promises, explicit or otherwise.
    She had not told me a thing about these men. Not a thing. This is the same Sammy who is wild in bed with me, the best lover I ever had, who makes me feel that there are no limits, no boundaries, ever, anywhere. But I was afraid she could take away my fairy dust and dump me back on earth. Dump me hard.
    When we finished the puzzle, Annie and I set the table. It had sort of become my regular chore. Sarah put the napkins around, but Annie claimed she put them on the wrong side, and Sarah said she didn’t, and Annie said Sarah was stupid. Elena said that name calling wasn’t allowed and sent Annie to her room. When Annie came back she apologized, and Rachel spilt her milk. Around all this, we were eating a casserole that Sammy had put together that morning, when one of her patients had called to report mild, irregular contractions. Sammy had had a feeling that the woman would be in hard labor by the afternoon. She’d started cooking and she had called me to let me know that she wouldn’t be able to say goodbye in person. She’d be midwifing.
    I can’t compete with the commencement of a new life on earth, either.
    After we ate, I looked at my watch and said I had to go. They all said goodbye, and have a safe trip and come back soon. I felt really nervous and started backing towards the door, still awkward about initiating hugs. Then Rachel started after me and threw her arms around my knees, crying “Up-ee, up-ee.” I picked her up and hugged her. I saw too late that she had tomato sauce on her hands and now it was smeared all over the front of my shirt, a tight, gold-colored, Lycra body shirt. I kissed her dark, crinkly hair, and hugged her and put her down. Then I got the hell out of there, while the getting was good.
     
    The flight down was uneventful enough. I had brought some books stuffed in my shoulder bag, but I didn’t read them. It doesn’t seem right to me to read too much on a plane. Oh, the in-flight magazine would be all right, if you could stand it, or maybe a People purchased from the magazine shop in the airport specifically for the occasion. But how could it be safe to concentrate on something good, to really get into reading something, when you’re in a little cylinder of metal hurtling through the air? Flight is a form of levitation, after all. Seems like all that concentration might interfere with the pilot’s, or maybe it’s the navigator’s, brain waves. I bought a couple of drinks instead, just to slow down my brain waves and do my part toward cooperating with the flight crew’s vibrations.
    I stared out the window at the cotton-candy clouds beneath us, and thought about what I was doing. At first, it was mainly profound thoughts like “What the hell am I doing?” Then, after a while, without meaning to, I started