Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe Read Free Book Online Page A

respect it did matter. He was Italian. He wanted a big, raucous family. Lots of kids. Her childbearing years were limited.
    As soon as he got home, Phil sat down to talk about this with his mother. Her acceptance was important.
    “If you feel that way about this girl,” she told him, “don’t let her go.”
    That decided it.
    Janie, too, was thinking about their relationship. “But, Jesus, he’s so young,” she told a friend. He was also passionate and exciting, and she loved his dark good looks, was flattered by his attentions.
    Delores had taken note. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told her friend Joyce Rose one day that spring. “Janie has dragged home a New York street Italian.” She mentioned him to Susan Reid as well. She didn’t like him. He was clearly rabble—a Kennedy lover. Besides, he’d made a terrible mess of her kitchen cooking spaghetti that wasn’t very good.
    From the day he left, Janie wrote to Phil every few days. She had remained at school, completing her lab work, and her letters were chatty, filled with news of classmates and school and everyday affairs, never romantic or gushy—that wasn’t Janie. But she signed them with love and an occasional “I miss you.”
    On the first of June, Jackie and Mario Timpone, old friends from Chicago and the parents of one of Janie’s early loves, came to visit Delores and Janie, bringing eight quarts of home-cooked spaghetti sauce and a boxful of pastries from Naples Bakery in Chicago. Janie took a day off from school to be with them. In mid-June, Janie and her mother went to a picnic with the Little Colonel Players. By the end of the month, Janie was making final adjustments on her patients’ teeth at the school clinic and the university was pressuring her to leave her apartment. She tried for an extension through July but won a reprieve only until the eighteenth.
    By the Fourth of July, she’d finished her work at school, received her diploma, and moved out all of her equipment. But she remained in her apartment and seemed reluctant to leave.
    “I went back to the Dr. on Mon.,” she wrote Phil. “He said the same old thing—I’m anemic and continue taking my thyroid med.—also I’d gained 4 lbs since Dec. I know I’ll not be able to hold down a job in dentistry feeling this bad—so I’ll probably try another Dr. for a 2nd opinion or just go into hibernation.”
    The following weekend, Janie went to Lexington to visit an old friend, Vicky Graff. Janie had gotten to know Vicky at the University of Kentucky in 1969, when Vicky was an undergraduate student. Vicky later went to graduate school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and Janie visited her there several times. Vicky married a doctor, a pathologist, and in 1979 they settled in Lexington. Now Vicky was pregnant with her third child, and she and her family were temporarily living in an apartment while their new house was being completed.
    More than two years had passed since Vicky had seen Janie, and she was surprised at the changes. Janie was still perky, all smiles, but worn and older, with a harder edge. “She seemed a little more cynical, a little more sarcastic,” Vicky later recalled. A little more like her mother, Vicky thought.
    As Janie played with Vicky’s children, reading stories to William well past his bedtime, Vicky sensed remorse in Janie that she hadn’t yet found her place, settled down, married, and had children. But that possibility seemed far away. Janie gave Vicky the distinct impression that she had no intention of pursuing her romance with her young friend in New Jersey. “Maybe with Janie,” Vicky said later, “the harder you pushed the more she ran.”
    Later, Vicky took Janie to see her new house, and as they stood in the unfinished living room, Vicky said, “The next time you come, we’re going to be in here having a gin and tonic.”
    Vicky wanted Janie to stay for a few days, but when they got back to the apartment, Delores