Good Hope Road by Lisa Wingate Read Free Book Online

concern.
    “Well,” I said, by way of explaining myself, “I just want to make sure that no-good father of hers don’t come home and get cross with her for helping us. You know he don’t allow that tractor off the place. One time I saw him drive right by on his tractor and leave two old ladies stuck in the ditch in the snow. If he’d been there during the tornado, we’d of died in the cellar probably.”
    “Mama. Don’t talk like that.”
    “Well, it’s true. But I ain’t dead, so I want to cook chili in the morning and take it to the armory.”
    “Weldon said you need to rest. The only reason you’re not at the hospital is because we can’t get you there.”
    The way she talked to me like a child ruffled my feathers. “I’m not a cripple, and I’m fine. I ain’t sittin’ on no couch all day tomorrow when there’s work to be done. We’ll cook chili and we’ll take it down to the armory and serve it up to the folks.”
    The muscles in the side of Janet’s jaw twitched, but she smiled at me the way she might at an ill-behaved child. “You don’t need to be at the armory, Mama. We can cook tomorrow if you want, and I’ll take it down there.”
    “I’m goin’ to the armory tomorrow if I have to load that chili in the wheelbarra’ and push it there on foot.” No one can accuse me of not having pluck. I’ve always had plenty of pluck. “There is no way on God’s earth I would ever sit on the sofa all day wallowing in my own misery when there is work to be done.” I stood back and looked her hard in the eye, so she’d know she might as well make plans to go to town. I wasn’t going to back down. I couldn’t.
    There had to be a reason I didn’t die in that cellar, and maybe this was it. Maybe there needed to be someone around after this storm who could help folks pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go on—somebody stubborn like me.
    Janet sighed and shook her head while I finished the last of the dishes and set them on a towel. “I can’t talk about all this right now,” she muttered tiredly. “We all just need to get to bed.”
    I felt bad for arguing. Didn’t seem like we should be arguing on a day when we’d been spared from death’s door. “I thought I’d wait up for Weldon.”
    Her shoulders started to shake as she turned away. “There’s no way to know when he’ll be back. There’s no way to know anything.” She didn’t say anything more, just walked off down the hall looking tired.
    I stood alone in the kitchen, then walked outside to the bucket of water to clean up. Closing my eyes, I sat in a drift of moonlight and rubbed the cool, fresh water over my arms and legs. I took in a draft of air, smelling the mineral spring, thinking of how I used to love to visit the spring by moonlight.
    I smiled at the memory, almost forgetting where I was, almost losing the terrible picture of the day. It didn’t seem possible that such destruction could be real. Everything was so silent now. But even the quiet told me the night wasn’t right. No katydids churring, no whippoorwills singing, no coyotes calling out to the heavy orange moon. Nothing was the way it should of been.
    I went inside, slipped off my shoes, and climbed into the sofa bed beside little Lacy. In the moonlight her face looked peaceful, like sleep had taken her away from all that was. I closed my eyes and hoped it would take me away too.
    Ivy’s angel come sometime in the dark of midnight, sometime when my mind was drifting through dreams of the old days. She stretched out her hand to me and tried again to tell me something, but the wind started to blow, pulling me away.
    In the darkness, breath come rushing into me like the swoosh from a passing train, howling on its way to someplace, the wheels thumping over the track in a rhythm . Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump .
    I thought about Olney, and where he might be on one of those trains, and when he might drive it back to the station here and come on home