Blue Willow by Deborah Smith Read Free Book Online

bright little eyes.
    “You’ve got to go back, boy,” she said. “You’re too old to run off from responsibility.”
    Responsibility . Artemas hung his head. All grandmothers had that word welded to their dentures. They didn’t know just how much responsibility he had. His parents had lost Port’s Heart to the bank. They’d moved the family to Uncle Charles’s shabby but still respectable estate, where Charles disdainfully refused to share the main house. Instead, he gave them an old ten-room cottage that had served as the estate manager’s home in the glory years long before Artemas’s birth. Dismayed by the ignominy, Artemas’s parents cultivated their far-flung friends and were always visiting somewhere, often for weeks or even months at a time. They left Artemas’s brother and sisters in the care of governesses.
    Grandmother, who lived in the main house, was constantly fighting and scheming to evade Uncle Charles’s control. Charles’s wife snubbed the entire Colebrook clan and paraded their college-age daughters in society, telling everyone that she’d get them safely married to money and a better name.
    Grandmother told Artemas that neither Uncle Charles nor Father were the men she would have raised them to be, if she’d had the power to keep them with her at Blue Willow, but at least Uncle Charles was bright enoughto keep Colebrook China out of bankruptcy. She put up with him.
    Artemas tried to set an example for his brothers and sisters and make certain they were treated decently. He tried to live up to Grandmothers expectations. He tried manfully to ignore his uncle’s nasty comments and petty humiliations.
    He was filled up to the throat with trying, and he knew how it felt to strangle.
    Mrs. MacKenzie clucked at his lack of appetite, then rose and came to him. “I’ll put some more liniment on you after I’ve washed the dishes,” she said, smoothing her warm, callused hands over his throbbing face. “You rest now, you hear? You have to go back to New York, but you sure don’t have to worry about it until tomorrow.”
    He was shocked at how her touch embarrassed him. He wanted to stare at the large breasts making mounds under her short-sleeved flannel shirt. He’d never thought of her that way, almost six years ago. He flushed from the inside out, filling with strange, discomforting sensations he’d begun suffering lately around the opposite sex. Guilty and confused, he looked away. Nothing was the same.
    But Mrs. MacKenzie ruffled his crew cut as if he were still a child. “I think it’s time Lily heard the bear story. I bet you don’t even remember me tellin’ it to you when you were little, do you, Artie?”
    “I remember.” He shot a grateful look at her, warming to the memory. Cutting his eyes across the table at Lily, he added, “But I bet it’s too scary for a little girl.”
    “Is not,” she chirped. “I saw a baby bear in the back pasture last year. And I didn’t run.”
    “I bet it ran,” he countered, arching a brow. “I bet it said, There’s that monkey with the rotten apples.’ ”
    “I’m not a monkey!”
    Mrs. MacKenzie put her hands up. “Hush, both of you. Do you want me to tell the story, or not?”
    “Yes!” they answered in unison.
    After the dishes were washed and put away, and they’d helped Grandma MacKenzie back to bed, and Mr.MacKenzie had gone out to check on the livestock for the night, Mrs. MacKenzie took Artemas and Lily to the plain little front parlor, switched on a small ceramic lamp on a claw-footed table in one corner, and told them to sit on the couch. Lily curled up beside Artemas, cheerfully elbowing him in the ribs. He thumbed his nose at her, and her mouth popped open in shock. “Mama, he—”
    “Tattletale,” he interjected.
    She clamped her mouth shut and gave him a slit-eyed stare, but said no more.
    Suddenly Mrs. MacKenzie crouched and growled, capturing their attention. The lamp cast spooky shadows on her. She crooked