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

gripped Magdalena’s shoulders “Okay, move it,” Rose said, “Lots to do, right? Just remember you can do anything you set your mind to, Magdalena. There are no limits on your future. None.”
    Rose patted Magdalena’s back, spun her toward the kitchen and smacked her on the behind as though sending a horse out to pasture.
    Magdalena looked over her shoulder, face twisted up with confusion before she disappeared into the kitchen.
    Rose never had to worry about Magdalena being a wayward sort—a poor decision maker. No, Magdalena had everything Rose never did. No black holes marring her soul.
    She’d given Magdalena and Johnny all the love and security they needed to grow up and make the right decisions. She didn’t have to waste her time wondering if they were okay. And that was as comforting as anything to Rose.
    * * *
    Rose stood just outside the kitchen doorway. She leaned against the wall, gripped by exhaustion, remembering she had only slept a few hours before she’d been called out to the Greshecky’s to deliver Isabella’s baby. She could hear her family, the lot of them, gathered in the kitchen. At that moment, she wished they would all disappear and she could go about her business without interference.
    Rose grimaced. She wanted to obliterate that awful thought, but it was there to stay. She prayed for peace and the ability to be content with what she had, this family. But, she and Henry had worked hard to put money away for a nice family of four to purchase a home. It seemed so simple. Save more than you spend. Reasonable. Especially when both parents did work.
    Yet, there was still no house for the Pavlesics. Not when family members needed to borrow from their savings, or stole it. Or gambled it away. Because family staying together in the hopes of making a better life took precedence over everything.
    The Pavlesics lived enmeshed like prickly strands of hemp, twined together, abrasive, but strong from one end of the rope to the other. The rope may have been strained from the hemorrhaging of their joint bank accounts, or by petty arguments and useless jealousy, but it was as stable as it needed to be. The damage wasn’t even noticeable from certain angles, or over time.
    Rose told herself to toughen up. She should go to her family, to Henry for comfort. But she had never been able to verbalize her feelings as she wished she could. She was grateful for Henry and the family he’d given her by marriage, but still, even with them seven feet away she felt alone in every way.
    The steady hum of conversation, punctuated by Buzzy’s guffaws and expressions of “you don’t say!” kept Rose from moving. She couldn’t shake the heaviness in her chest. She took a deep breath and exhaled as she peered around the wall.
    The family sat sausaged at a table intended for six, shoulder jostling shoulder, squeezed so tight that Rose often let the coal go low during the course of a meal for all the warmth generated by sheer body heat and a hot argument. Buzzy’s and Sara Clara’s child, Leo, and Johnny and Magdalena sat along one side of the beat-up Formica table.
    Auntie Anna, an elephantine white-haired woman sat at the far end of the table, grinning at Leo. She fingered the leather strings around her neck that held her bulging suede sack of cash between her shapeless breasts. Unk was at the end closest to the stove, rubbing his temples, lost in his thoughts or simply confused by the banter.
    Sara Clara’s wide smile and cheerful expression was in full force. She was clearly over her earlier mood or faking it so no one besides Rose would know of her melancholy. Her neat figure was made more alluring by jeans, showcasing her long, trim legs, and a form-fitting, coral cardigan pushed her breasts out over the table as though Isaly’s had purchased advertising there and demanded Sara Clara make a sale that very breakfast.
    The picture-perfect twenty-three year-old sat cinched between Henry and Buzzy. Sara Clara’s