Good Heavens by Margaret A. Graham Read Free Book Online

didn’t you? You made a bad choice, Linda, but you are not a bad person.”
    I’m telling you, Ursula said that with a straight face. I couldn’t believe my ears!
    Linda stopped laughing. “Hogwash! It wasn’t me made a bad choice, it was that doctor. He had no right leaving that pad in plain sight. If I didn’t pick it up, somebody else would have. That’s the way it’s always been for me—every trouble I ever had come from choices other people made, not me.”
    â€œYes, perhaps, but when you were released from that correctional facility—”
    â€œSo, I broke probation. Reason that happened was because of the crowd I fell in with. They were the only friends I could find, and to be friends with them you had to go along, drinking, druggin’, an’ stealing, big time. I was the only one got caught. The judge wouldn’t letme go back to West Virginia. He told me I had to go to another rehab, so I come here.”
    I didn’t like what I was hearing. The other girls were enjoying all this talk, and I could well imagine how Linda would fill in the details of her rotten past when they were upstairs or out on the porch by themselves. I felt I had to put a stop to this if I could, so I spoke up. “It seems to me that airing our dirty underwear don’t do nothing to glorify God—”
    â€œDoesn’t do anything ,” Ursula repeated, her face tight as a tick.
    â€œDid I say something wrong?”
    â€œâ€˜Don’t do nothing’ is a double negative,” she informed me. The women were really enjoying this—seeing us at odds was probably the most fun they’d had in a long time.
    â€œWhatever,” I said and went on, confused and flustered. “We don’t need to air all our troubles. Splurgeon says, ‘He who talks much of his troubles to men is apt to fall into a way of saying too little of them to God.’”
    Would you believe that Ursula corrected me again! “Don’t you mean ‘Spurgeon’?” she snapped. “Charles Haddon Spurgeon?”
    â€œNo,” I said, confident that I was right. “His name is C. H. Splurgeon.”
    â€œC. H.? The C. H. stands for Charles Haddon, and his name is not Splurgeon ,” she insisted. “His name is Spurgeon.”
    The girls could hardly contain themselves—a few of them were trying to be nice, but the rest were practically rolling on the floor. I felt so foolish I could have run outof that room. I had never called Reverend Splurgeon anything but Splurgeon, and I was sure that was what everybody else called him. I told myself, She must be thinking about somebody else . Then again, she wasn’t the kind to be wrong about anything.
    Ursula turned her attention to Portia, who was sitting beside Linda. “Now, Portia, tell us about yourself.”
    But Portia hung her head and had nothing to say.
    I sat there trying to figure out what I had done to provoke Ursula so bad. Maybe she was just having a bad day. If nothing else, our money problems were enough to stress her out.
    We kept waiting for Portia to say something. That tattoo gave me the creeps. It twined around her neck like ivy. I’d seen tattoos before but nothing like that one.
    Ursula tried again. “Portia, Linda said you hate cats. Why is it you hate cats?”
    There was a long pause, and it didn’t look like she was going to answer. Every eye was on that thin, narrow face, waiting for her to say something. When she did speak, her voice sounded dry as gravel. “I was locked in a closet with a dead cat for three days.”
    Shocked is hardly the word for it. Everybody in the room looked stunned. That is, everyone except Linda, who piped up, “I was locked in a motel room for a week and gang-raped by ten sheriff’s deputies.”
    Even Lenora, the frail one with the empty eyes, stared at Portia and Linda in shocked disbelief.
    We had hardly