When Did We Lose Harriet? Read Online Free
Author: Patricia Sprinkle
years, have some good memories and anticipate a good many more, but I never realized how much some people like to talk about sex—particularly people who look as if they aren’t getting enough of it.
When I’d told Joe Riddley that on the phone the night before, he’d chuckled. “MacLaren, honey, we both know sex is a lot like eating—sometimes a feast and sometimes just a quick bite on the road to somewhere else—but doing it sure beats talking about it.”
By the end of that next week in Montgomery, I’d be delighted that Joe Riddley was still in Georgia where he belonged. As I pressed my forehead to the cold window, though—straining for my first glimpse of Montgomery’s lights in the country darkness—I missed him something terrible. I couldn’t help thinking that if the plane kept going for another hour or so, we’d be over middle Georgia and could land in my son Ridd’s back cotton field. I could sleep in my own bed with Joe Riddley heavy and sweet beside me. Why the dickens hadn’t Jake’s guardian angel protected him for one more week?
I was grumbling to keep from bawling, and I knew it. There I was with years of practice praying for sick people, and now that it was Jake I found myself reduced to “Please, God, please, God, please, God!”
To make me even grumpier, I looked a wreck. I like to look nice, and while I’m no longer the slip of a thing in my wedding pictures, I still have the same big brown eyes and (with the connivance of my beauty operator) keep my hair almost the same honey brown. Joe Riddley even assures me I’ve grown voluptuous, not plump. He’s a verynice man when he wants to be. That night, however, I was about as attractive as a wilty cabbage leaf. If I stopped looking through the airplane window and merely looked in it, I saw a woman with bags under her eyes, crow’s feet radiating to her hairline, and all her lipstick chewed off.
It wasn’t just worry over Jake that had me looking that way. Nobody warned me that national church meetings go on day and night. Leaders seem to think that just because God neither slumbers nor sleeps, neither should anybody else. Between lying awake every night for a week ahead planning what to take and what I wanted to say, and trying to stay awake in late meetings, I hadn’t gotten any decent sleep for days. When you are on the shady side of sixty, you need your rest. I’d been feeling grumpy even before Jake’s wife, Glenna, called to say he was in intensive care. Of course I had to go, right away.
When the plane landed, I could hardly wait for the pilot to turn off the engines and the flight attendants to open the door. I pushed my way almost rudely into the passenger inch-walk down the cabin, and nearly ran toward the terminal. Glenna was waiting just inside. The sight of her fairly broke my heart. How could a woman age so much in one day?
Glenna has never been a beauty. She’s tall and bony, seldom bothers with creams and powders, has been gray since she was forty, and doesn’t fuss much with her hair—just cuts it to fall straight and cup her cheeks on each side. Her big gray eyes are so kind, though, that I’ve seen grieving children fling themselves into her arms. She also has something my mother’s generation referred to as “breeding”—an easy way of carrying herself and wearing clothes that lets anybody with two eyes know she grew up in a family with enough money and education not to need to parade either one. That night, though, her skin looked like it had been left on a counter overnight when it should have been refrigerated, and her eyes had the same stricken look I had seen in a dog begging to be put down.She was smiling as I went toward her, but when I held out my arms, her face crumpled.
We hugged awkwardly, both because Glenna is five-nine and I five-three and because we aren’t accustomed to touching. Our closeness has always been one of spirit, not bodies.
“Oh, Clara!” Glenna said over and over,
When I’d told Joe Riddley that on the phone the night before, he’d chuckled. “MacLaren, honey, we both know sex is a lot like eating—sometimes a feast and sometimes just a quick bite on the road to somewhere else—but doing it sure beats talking about it.”
By the end of that next week in Montgomery, I’d be delighted that Joe Riddley was still in Georgia where he belonged. As I pressed my forehead to the cold window, though—straining for my first glimpse of Montgomery’s lights in the country darkness—I missed him something terrible. I couldn’t help thinking that if the plane kept going for another hour or so, we’d be over middle Georgia and could land in my son Ridd’s back cotton field. I could sleep in my own bed with Joe Riddley heavy and sweet beside me. Why the dickens hadn’t Jake’s guardian angel protected him for one more week?
I was grumbling to keep from bawling, and I knew it. There I was with years of practice praying for sick people, and now that it was Jake I found myself reduced to “Please, God, please, God, please, God!”
To make me even grumpier, I looked a wreck. I like to look nice, and while I’m no longer the slip of a thing in my wedding pictures, I still have the same big brown eyes and (with the connivance of my beauty operator) keep my hair almost the same honey brown. Joe Riddley even assures me I’ve grown voluptuous, not plump. He’s a verynice man when he wants to be. That night, however, I was about as attractive as a wilty cabbage leaf. If I stopped looking through the airplane window and merely looked in it, I saw a woman with bags under her eyes, crow’s feet radiating to her hairline, and all her lipstick chewed off.
It wasn’t just worry over Jake that had me looking that way. Nobody warned me that national church meetings go on day and night. Leaders seem to think that just because God neither slumbers nor sleeps, neither should anybody else. Between lying awake every night for a week ahead planning what to take and what I wanted to say, and trying to stay awake in late meetings, I hadn’t gotten any decent sleep for days. When you are on the shady side of sixty, you need your rest. I’d been feeling grumpy even before Jake’s wife, Glenna, called to say he was in intensive care. Of course I had to go, right away.
When the plane landed, I could hardly wait for the pilot to turn off the engines and the flight attendants to open the door. I pushed my way almost rudely into the passenger inch-walk down the cabin, and nearly ran toward the terminal. Glenna was waiting just inside. The sight of her fairly broke my heart. How could a woman age so much in one day?
Glenna has never been a beauty. She’s tall and bony, seldom bothers with creams and powders, has been gray since she was forty, and doesn’t fuss much with her hair—just cuts it to fall straight and cup her cheeks on each side. Her big gray eyes are so kind, though, that I’ve seen grieving children fling themselves into her arms. She also has something my mother’s generation referred to as “breeding”—an easy way of carrying herself and wearing clothes that lets anybody with two eyes know she grew up in a family with enough money and education not to need to parade either one. That night, though, her skin looked like it had been left on a counter overnight when it should have been refrigerated, and her eyes had the same stricken look I had seen in a dog begging to be put down.She was smiling as I went toward her, but when I held out my arms, her face crumpled.
We hugged awkwardly, both because Glenna is five-nine and I five-three and because we aren’t accustomed to touching. Our closeness has always been one of spirit, not bodies.
“Oh, Clara!” Glenna said over and over,