June by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Read Free Book Online Page A

shocked and delighted to receive a large check in Eben’s name, accompanied by an enthusiastic acceptance letter to business school in Columbus. The old man had arranged it.
    Eben didn’t talk much about his parents, but Lindie knew they’d been hardworking folk whose trade was more like Apatha’s (sweeping, baking, dusting, waxing) than like his own. Two Oaks remembered its original, lovely caretakers—how they sometimes held hands over the kitchen table, how the sour stink of Ellen’s boiled cabbage would fill the whole downstairs, and the awful day when she fell from the ladder while dusting the foyer light fixture. And though the son of these good, simple folk had become a man of numbers, land, and oil, he’d never forgotten where he’d come from. In the days before Cheryl Ann, he and Lindie spent hours on the Two Oaks front porch, tending to the small and necessary tasks Apatha couldn’t get to. Sundays, Eben would fiddle with the shrieking doorbell with a Phillips screwdriver, his ledger and fountain pen forgotten on the porch floor, while Apatha read aloud from
Huckleberry Finn
. Beside Uncle Lem on the porch swing, Lindie watched the old man’s wrinkled lips putter along with Mark Twain’s sentences. Eventually, he would doze off, and, dappled in sweet summer light, Lindie would imagine Jim and Huck on their raft as her father unscrewed a porch bulb atop a ladder, and bumblebees mumbled lazily across the afternoon.
    After lunch, little Lindie would help Apatha put up the wash, and the wet, white linens would flap in the sun. In the evenings, Apatha would bring out her darning gourd and repair their socks, or knit cotton dishrags while Lindie lay, chin propped up, in front of the great radio console in the foyer and listened to
The Lone Ranger
followed by
The Grand Ole Opry
. Sometimes at night they’d put an old Strauss waltz onto the Victrola that Lemon and his long-dead wife, Mae, had received as a wedding gift many years before, and the whole house would bloom with the tinny pace of one-two-three one-two-three.
    Lindie’s drowsy mind mingled with the household’s lulling memories of that sweet time, now gone, until she heard a sound that alarmed her. It came from June’s side of the room. It was a sound Lindie remembered from Lorraine’s days, one she hadn’t heard often, but enough to recognize, the sound of a woman getting ready to go out, not to the market or the corner, not to school, as she’d heard June do on plenty of cold winter mornings (the scratch of wool, the slip of buttons), but to impress: the adult swish of ironed cotton as it drops down over a nylon slip.
    Lindie sat up. June was standing before the mirror to the left of the window that, in the light of day, now overlooked Lindie’s humble bungalow just across the street, where Eben was still snoring, and the dishes remained unwashed. June wore a navy dress that brought out the dark ocean of her eyes. The fabric nipped in at her waist, making her hips seem even curvier than they already were. Her breasts pressed, high and round, against the bodice, as though begging to be set free. Her cheeks were rouged, her lips stained red, her long hair curled and tucked under.
    “You can’t wear that.” Lindie’s disapproving tone masked the itchiness of her palms, the shallow lump of her heart as it fluttered far too fast. She wanted to cover June with a blanket. “The movie’s set right after the Civil War.”
    In the mirror, June’s face grew solemn. This was the same face she’d made two summers before, the day she’d had to break the news that the robins had flown from their nest and she’d found one of the downy hatchlings with a broken neck just below it. But her voice stayed cheery. “Do me up?” Her dress was open in the back, showing the sweet press of her shoulder blades through her slip. Lindie could just make out the delicate outline of her white brassiere, and ached to lay her palms against those small winged plates,