Broken by Mary Ann Gouze Read Free Book Online Page B

The sirens grew louder—closer. Tables were up-righted, chairs shoved into place, jackets and hats retrieved from wherever they had landed. When the overhead light went on, a resounding groan filled the room. Men, shielding their eyes from the harsh glare, hollered, “Shut those damn lights off!”
    The bartender, down from the bar and holding a mop, ignored them. The police arrived, decided that nobody was seriously hurt, had free drinks and left. Salvador Tamero, his cut hand wrapped in a bar rag, followed them out. Walter resumed his place at the bar where he picked up his half full mug that had miraculously survived the melee. He finished the beer in a long series of gulps.
     

CHAPTER NINE
    Anna Mae and David heard the sirens. Pushing a chair to the bedroom window, Anna Mae helped David up so that he could see the blue and white flashing lights. But, whatever was going on was so far away, there wasn’t much to see.
    David jumped down and scurried across the room to the bookshelf near his bed. “Horton,” he said, shoving a book at Anna Mae. “Pweaseeee Annie! Read Horton Hatches the Egg!”
    “Just one story,” she said, taking the book from his small hands and ruffling his brown curls, “and then I have to study my spelling.”
    Monday’s spelling test was important to her final grade. But she had the whole weekend to learn her words. She opened the book.
    She read with comfortable ease, grateful as David cuddled against her. Although he couldn’t read, he had heard the story so often that he practically knew it by heart. Pointing to the doleful Elephant balancing precariously on a bending tree branch in the middle of a thunderstorm, David wiggled and exclaimed, “Rain!”
    “And he sat all day,” Anna Mae read.
    “He kept the egg warm!” David beamed.
    “And he sat all night.”
    “Anna Mae!” Sarah called up the stairs. “David should have been in bed an hour ago.”
    David ran to the top of the stairs. “Annie is reading me a story.”
    “You go to bed!” Sarah ordered.
    Grumbling, David went back to the bedroom. Anna Mae had already closed the book. “I’ll read you the rest tomorrow.”
    Side by side, they knelt beside David’s bed. Anna Mae had taught David to say his bedtime prayers. If it had been up to Sarah or Walter, he never would have learned. A few years back, when cleaning her aunt and uncles bedroom, she found a dusty box. In it was a Bible. Not long afterwards, Walter caught her reading the New Testament. He ripped it out of her hands and threw it across the room yelling, “Bullshit! All bullshit! I don’t want you getting any goofy ideas reading that thing!”
    If anything, that made Anna Mae even more eager to know what was on those pages. She hid the Bible in her closet behind her shoes and took it out when Walter wasn’t around. The more she read, the stronger her faith grew and she began to take David to church almost every Sunday.
    Now they knelt together side by side and she smiled as David blessed everyone from the mailman to the old woman down the street, who wore a winter coat when it wasn’t cold. “. . . and God bless Anna Mae, and Stanley, and my mother, and…and…pweasee God, make Daddy not be mad when he gets home.”
    “Aaaa…men!”
     
    *     *     *
     
    It was after midnight when Walter left the bar. As his car swerved toward home, a picture of his father’s face flashed through his head. And just as quickly, he was assaulted with a vivid image of his father attacking him with a shovel. Walter’s meaty hands gripped the steering wheel as the car bounced up onto the curb and back down again only to veer over the white line. An oncoming car screeched to a stop. Walter, blinded by the car’s headlights, swerved back into his own lane ignoring the curses that followed him.
    Moments later, he pulled to the curb in front of his house, flipped the gearshift into park, and turned off the key. His muddled thoughts went back through time: the