When Did We Lose Harriet? Read Online Free Page B

always been car proud. He likes new, pretty ones, and treats them more like girlfriends than steel and plastic. This year’s red Buick Park Avenue gleamed in their unpaved drive, an Auburn sticker in its back window. It was almost easier to see him in the hospital than it was to see his car in the driveway and know he might never come home to drive it.
    Glenna seemed to feel the same, for although she is naturally quiet, she chattered like a squirrel as she lifted the heavier bag from the car. “We haven’t had a bit of rain for weeks. I don’t know what the yard will do if we don’t get some soon. But look! The old magnolia saved three blossoms for you. The rest bloomed earlier, but those waited for you to get here.” I peered up the fat old tree. Sure enough, three creamy blossoms glowed in the darkness.
    Higher up, from towering pines, came the whir of thousands of tiny motors humming in the night. “The cicadas are certainly having a fling!” I exclaimed. Cicadas are noisy little locusts that hibernate for years, then creepout of the ground, sing their hearts out, lay their eggs, and die. On their jubilee, the whole South gets a bumper crop, but where I live, every year a few rebels come up out of season. This was either a jubilee, or Montgomery’s cicadas have the same spirit that made that city the first capital of the Confederacy.
    As I waited on the front walk for Glenna to unlock the door, I took a deep breath of thick air scented with honeysuckle, pine, and boxwood, and thought how remarkable she and Jake were. When they’d been married about three years and had just learned Glenna could never have a baby, they bought a comfortable six-room house in Montgomery’s South Hull District, a neighborhood of modest brick homes. Their house has a big yard and ceilings high enough so you don’t smother, but it also has two small bathrooms and a kitchen Glenna keeps talking about remodeling but never has. Over the years, when a lot of their friends and neighbors moved east to newer neighborhoods with roomy, modern kitchens, enormous bathrooms, and several extra rooms, Jake used to ask, “You want to move, honey?”
    Glenna always replied, “Wouldn’t you rather put our money in something that really matters, Jake?” Only their family, their church treasurer, and the postman who brings appeals and carries away checks know what matters to Jake and Glenna Crane. I never let them hear me say it, but as far as I know there are no finer people on God’s green earth.
    Thinking of losing Jake was like a knife in my heart. When Glenna stepped inside and called, “Coming, dear?” I could hardly see to hurry up the steps.
    I saw Glenna off for her all-night vigil, kicked off my shoes, and unpacked. After a long cool shower I was padding barefoot across the kitchen’s old black and whitelinoleum tiles for a glass of milk when the phone rang. “MacLaren Yarbrough,” I answered automatically, then corrected myself. “Crane residence.”
    There was a silence on the other end, then an explosion. “Woman, what are you doing there? You are supposed to be in Albuquerque!”
    “Joe Riddley!”
    I knew I was wasting my charm. He barely paused for breath. “When Glenna called here this morning looking for you, I was stupid enough to give her your number, but five minutes later I wished I hadn’t. I just knew you’d do some fool thing like hare off to Montgomery. I never imagined you’d do it so fast, though. What’d you do—sprout wings and fly solo?”
    “I got the first plane out, just like any caring sister would.”
    “Caring, my hind foot. You’ll badger that poor man to death.”
    “I’m not badgering him!” I took a deep breath to fortify myself. Talking to Joe Riddley can be like walking into the Atlantic during a hurricane. You don’t make much headway, and you often wind up flattened. Oddly enough, though, he is the mildest man in Hopemore when he’s on the magistrate’s bench. Did I forget to tell