A Common Life by Jan Karon Read Free Book Online Page B

crying years ago when her daddy passed. Whenever she felt like crying, she had learned to turn it inside, where it sometimes felt like a Popsicle melting. She had read an article in a magazine at Fancy Skinner’s which said that if you turn sorrow in, it will come out—as cancer or something worse, though she couldn’t think of anything worse. The article had gone on to say that intimacy with your husband was good for your health, and no matter what else might happen in this life, she and Ray had that in spades; forty-seven years later, they were still holding hands just like on their first date.
    Before Ray, Bobby Prestwood had tried everything to get in her good graces, including making a fool of himself in Sunday School when he stood up one morning and told what he was thankful for. “I’m thankful for my Chevy V-8, my mama and daddy, and Esther Lovell!” She didn’t give a katy what Bobby Prestwood was thankful for, and told him so at the picnic, which was where she met Ray. Ray had come late with his cousins, carrying a basket of fried chicken and coleslaw, which he’d made himself. She couldn’t believe that anybody that big and tall and good-looking could cook, much less chop cabbage; it just amazed her. She had eyed him up and down to see if he was a sissy, but found no evidence of this. When the cousins invited her to sit with them, she accepted, ate three pieces of Ray’s fried chicken with all the trimmings, and took home a wing wrapped in a napkin. Two months later, they were married.
    To this day, she’d never met another woman whose husband rubbed her feet, or maybe people just never mentioned it. And not only did Ray rub her feet after she’d worked like a dog all day and half the night in meetings at town hall, he’d have her supper in the oven, which she sometimes took to bed and ate sitting up watching TV, with him lying there patting her leg. “Little darlin’,” he might say while he patted.
    If she ever had to climb in a bed without Ray Cunningham in it, she would die, she would go morte, as Lew Boyd liked to say.
    She picked up the phone and dialed home.
    “Ray . . .”
    She heard Teensy barking in the background. “Hey, sugar babe! It’s hot as blazes today, I’ll run you up a jar of lemonade in a little bit. What else you need?”
    She wouldn’t have told him that all she needed was to hear his voice.

    Uncle Billy shuffled to the dining room and rifled through stacks of newspaper that the town inspector had threatened to haul off, but had forgotten to do. He was after some copies of The Farmer’s Almanac that he’d saved for the jokes.
    Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip as he worked through the piles, but not a trace of a Farmer’s Almanac with its red cover could he find. Dadgummit, he’d hid things in here for years and always managed to find them, and now, not a trace.
    He worked his hand around in the pile of Mitford Muse s , which occupied a space next to the kitchen door, and felt for the familiar shape of an almanac. What was that? He pulled it out and looked. A twenty-dollar bill! He wanted to whoop, but knew better.
    If Rose got wind of this twenty, she’d connive every way in creation to yank it out of him. No, by jing, he’d do something he hardly ever did, but often thought about: he’d walk down to the Grill and get an order of fries and bring Rose a surprise milkshake. Besides, he’d gotten two or three of his best jokes at the Grill—maybe that was where he’d find this one.
    Careful to put the twenty in the pants pocket without the hole, he abandoned the search for the almanacs and instituted a hurried quest for any other currency he’d once hidden in the vicinity.

    Louella Baxter Marshall sat by the window in the sewing room, now her bedroom at Fernbank, looking at the catalog.
    The light was good in here and she could clearly see the picture of the dress she’d be wearing to the wedding.
    After two days of praying about it and going back and