Home Another Way by Christa Parrish Read Free Book Online

furniture, washed windows, and cleaned out closets and cupboards. Memory scrubbed the wood floor on her hands and knees, ample belly sopping up soap.
    “What would you like done with Luke’s clothes?” someone asked me, the woman with the nicotine-stained fingernails. Abby? Alice?
    I shrugged, looking at Maggie.
    “We can give them to Doc White, if you don’t mind, Sarah,” she said. “He can pass them out during his rounds.”
    “Fine,” I told her.
    “Box them up for Doc, Adele,” Maggie called.
    Adele. Right. Adele, with the yellow fingers.
    “What about this fiddle?” Adele asked, holding up a peeling leather case.
    “Leave it,” I said without hesitation, without thought.
    The pine-scented cleaner clogged my sinuses, and I stepped onto the front porch, surveying the land. Naked trees clawed the overcast sky. Gray branches stuck up from the snow, dead leaves clinging to the tips. I was those leaves, shivery and desperate, waiting helplessly to be swept away by the slightest breeze.
    “We’re about done in there,” Memory said, coming out onto the porch wearing a scarf and mittens, no coat. The boards croaked under her weight.
    I didn’t answer.
    “I said, we’re about done in there,” she shouted close to my ear, her wide face webbed with capillaries.
    “I’m not deaf,” I huffed.
    “Then don’t act it,” she said. “Oh, it’s chilly out here. I best be getting back to my boy. You coming for supper?”
    “What?”
    “Not deaf, eh? I said, are you coming for supper?”
    “Is that supposed to be an invitation?”
    “I seen what you got in those cupboards. You need some hospitality. Ain’t you never had anybody be nice to you?”
    Not recently. “Thank you, Ms. Jones, but I still have things to do here.”
    “I ain’t Miss anything. I’m just Memory—don’t you forget.” She snorted at her repeated pun. I didn’t.
    “Well, thank you anyway, Memory.”
    “I expect you’ll be by when you’re not so busy. Have fun eating those noodle things in a can. Don’t know how you do. Look like worms to me.” She slapped me on the shoulder and shuffled to her car.
    The other women spilled outside, each hugging me or patting my cheek. Maggie invited me to dinner, too, but I pleaded fatigue and locked myself in the cabin.
    I screwed new batteries into the flashlights and unrolled my sleeping bag onto the couch. The sun had dipped into the mountains, soaking the living room in deep purple shadows. I added two more logs to the fire and settled down for the night with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a bag of chips.
    One hundred and seventy-nine days of hibernation left to go.

chapter TEN
    Memory hobbled and huffed up the nine stairs to her house. Some days she wished for less—like five, or better yet, two—but most days she was thankful she could manage the nine without her lungs bursting like paper firecrackers.
    The storm door on the three-season porch had no handle; Memory kicked the bottom until it bounced open, and she stuck her elbow inside. The frayed screens and hole in the roof rendered the porch useless in any season, from springtime thunderstorms to pesky summer mosquitoes, to the heap of icy pine needles Memory now stepped over to get to the front door.
    It hit her as soon as she walked into the living room, the smell of disinfectant, tinged with urine. It didn’t matter that Memory scrubbed the house until the bleach water pickled her hands. The smell remained. She blamed the pressboard floors—the porous wood sucked in odors, held them, grew them—and had started making rag rugs. The Bethel Baptist Church, two towns west of Jonah, had a bag day at its thrift store on the third Wednesday of the month, two dollars for as much clothing as she could stuff into a plastic grocery sack. Memory took only the stained T-shirts. Still, the feeling lingered that, maybe, it was a sin to cover her floors with shirts somebody might still be able to wear.
    The rugs didn’t help, anyway. They