After the Fog by Kathleen Shoop Read Free Book Online Page A

or a feeling and invoke something she’d forgotten. But in being a good mother to Magdalena and Johnny, she had thought she could heal her past pain, her past sins.
    At the very least she could be vigilant about how her children looked and dressed. Rose knew what it was like to be clad in tattered clothes with shoes worn through to the pads of her feet. She knew what that did to a person’s soul. She understood the value of dressing well, and it wasn’t about shallow expressions of wealth. A girl’s appearance was the quickest way to send the message about herself, who she wanted to be or thought she was already.
    Only on the days when the orphanage was expecting nervous, fashionable couples, looking for a child to adopt, did someone touch Rose in anyway remotely nurturing. Those days the women at the orphanage would do Rose’s hair. But it wasn’t a loving gesture, more of a yanking, the sound of a comb thwacking through knots as Rose’s head snapped back and forth with the grooming. The memory of it made Rose shudder.
    Rose treated Magdalena’s grooming as an act of love. She’d never tugged Magdalena’s hair. She cherished every quiet moment with the comb she had.
    Rose’s eyes began to burn at the thought of Isabella and her infant daughter. They would never have these moments. Rose would never say it out loud, but if not for Ian being without Isabella now; Rose thought it was better both mother and daughter died at the same time. To live without your baby. Rose’s eyes filled. She knew what that meant. She couldn’t start thinking about that. She didn’t have the time to feel something so raw.
    “Mum? How old were you when you got married?”
    “Twenty.”
    Rose put the brush in her mouth and ran her fingers through Magdalena’s locks, remembering the picture of her and Henry on the baseball field, getting married at Forbes Field on the pitcher’s mound, that photo in Life Magazine, showing her as happy as she’d ever been.
    Rose ran the brush back through Magdalena’s hair. “That day was spectacular. Wow, that sun. We don’t get sun like that often. Fat and yellow as can be.” Rose wrapped the gum band around the hair and gently pulled Magdalena to standing with a sigh.
    “Why?” Rose said.
    “No reason.”
    Rose wondered if everyone was bizarre today on purpose or if they just couldn’t help it.
    Magdalena looked over her shoulder at Rose. “Daddy’s perfect. I want a man just like him.”
    Rose raised her chin at her seventeen-year-old daughter trying to see inside her soul. What did she really want to know with this line of questioning?
    Rose put the brush into her robe pocket.
    “You’re not worried about that bullshit are you? Boys? Pal around with the gang all you want, go roller skating with Susan and the Delany boys and so forth, but there’s no time for complicated love bullshit, right now.”
    Magdalena stiffened and drew away.
    Rose recalled her conversation with Johnny. “Wait, but you’re not going skating today? Johnny told me. You sick?”
    Magdalena shrugged and put her hands on hip, chin in the air, and for a second Rose saw every bit of who she was in her daughter.
    Magdalena blew out her air as though she’d just been told to clean up Unk’s waste. “Can’t a person be under the weather in her own house without the community nurse taking her temperature every five seconds? It’s this test I have. I really want that scholarship. Okay?”
    Rose was relieved by Magdalena’s words and she gathered her into a suffocating hug. Rose believed she would be able to feel any real trouble coursing through Magdalena’s veins if she just held her tight enough.
    Magdalena went stiff and tried to pull away. Rose gripped harder, until the girl had no choice but to embrace Rose back. Rose felt her daughter’s arms slide around her back and she laid her head on Rose’s shoulder.
    “I’m proud of you, Magdalena.”
    Magdalena nodded into Rose’s shoulder.
    Satisfied, she