Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle Read Free Book Online Page A

wearing one of his old T-shirts and it dwarfed her small frame. She clutched the child with one arm, and her free hand held the string around her neck as if it held all that Drew had promised her. A family. Laughter. A lifetime of love. “I do have a big fanny,” Rose said. “I really do.” The child’s loud mischievous laugh filled the room. She wiggled out of her mother’s arms and ran up to Rose, stopping just shy of their bodies touching. She raised her small hand and held it up in front of Rose’s breast as if daring Rose to do something.
    “That’s my breast,” Rose said, wiping her sticky hands with a dishtowel.
    “Nurser,” the child said, looking up and leaning in so close Rose could feel her breath.
    “My nurser.”
    “Tittie.” She reached and pressed Rose’s breast, leaving marker smudge on the pocket of her shirt.
    “Molly.” Drew’s wife straightened up and then reached in and grabbed the child’s hand, twisted, and yanked her away.
    “Tittie, say it.” The child was torn then between laughing and crying, her face flushed as she tried to shake loose her mother’s grip.
    Out the window, Rose saw Hank walking up from the mailbox, a sack of Purina over his shoulder; he loped along engaged in the world in a way few people are. Even the retrievers bouncing and barking along didn’t seem to faze him. Her heart filled with the sight of him there, a flow of blood coursing through her veins, and where did it come from? This feeling? This urgency?
    “Quit it.” Drew’s wife wiped her cheeks as she spoke, her voice filled with exhaustion. “Please.”
    “Not till she says it.”
    “Tittie,” Rose said then. “Tittie and nurser and tittie again.” She touched the child’s head, petted down a piece of sticky spiked hair. She held her open palm up to Drew’s wife to tell her to stay, to wait, please don’t leave , and some part of her wanted to linger there, to put her arm around the girl’s shoulders —her name was Melinda —to put her arm around Melinda’s shoulders the way that Hank had done. To hug the child —Drew’s child, Molly —close to her chest. But first she had to get to the door, then she would be right back. She would take the hot sweet bread from the oven and she would find a chain for the ring around Melinda’s neck, some clean shorts for Molly, but right now she could not get to the door fast enough. She was moving throughthe house then, her hands grasping the tops of tables and the backs of chairs —her hands leaving traces of sugar and flour, prints, traces of all their hands through all the years. And of course she would hear her son again. She would always hear him. There in the darkness, a pant and a whimper, a sigh and a whisper, the softest breath of a windless night as she lay waiting for sleep, Hank there by her side, and now she could not get to him fast enough.

MIDNIGHT CLEAR
    “What makes this night different from all the rest?” Charles asks. His hair is damp with sleep as he follows me from room to room, a crumbling graham cracker in one sticky hand and a glass of chocolate milk in the other. He is five. His brother, Michael, who is eight, is absorbed in the Game Boy he holds in his hand, a series of beeps and distracting sounds. He is also watching cartoons and moving one bare foot under the edge of the rug in a way that flips it and scatters dust and crumbs about every thirty seconds. The other question Charles has asked ten times since waking from his nap is how Santa Claus comes out of a wood-burning stove. “Won’t that hurt?” he asks. “What ifhe wants to give me something big?” This one got his brother’s attention. He has figured everything out about Santa Claus, you can see it in his eyes, but is not yet ready to admit the truth. Once the truth is admitted, there’s no taking it back, no return to what you once believed in so completely. You would think that those early experiences of disappointment and loss and disillusionment