Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman Read Free Book Online

town’s main street, which was still no more than two blocks long. And that sinning was mild, in the form of dominoes and beer, for this was the intense Bible Belt, where sugared iced tea, white bread, and churchgoing were the accepted standards of consumption and entertainment.
    Just outside Cypress, natural gas had been discovered, and the fields that sprung up made rich men of many farmers and landholders. It was in the hands of their wives and daughters that Cypress culture rested, with women who had their names written on the rolls of the Daughters of the Confederacy and never let anyone forget it. There never was and never would be anything for the ladies to do other than pour tea and eat lunch, because the two towns together could support nothing more entertaining than a roller rink, a bowling alley and a handful of picture shows. And the ladies were a minority in a society whose members’ necks were as basically and determinedly red as the clay in the hills just the other side of West Cypress. Therefore, when the ladies grew so hungry for enlightenment and shopping that they just couldn’t stand it another minute, they had to drive six hours south to New Orleans (where, if a lady was interested, she could also indulge in some serious sinning).
    On the other hand, when the ladies of West Cypress grew restless with change burning holes in their pockets, they drove across the bridge to Cypress, being of the opinion that the picture shows and the five and dimes on its main street were just fine.
    Why they were called the Twin Cities was a puzzlement to those of the inhabitants who had ever given the question any thought. Even their geography was different, Cypress’s being the richer. For the eastern bank of the Coupitaw, on which Cypress was perched, marked the very western boundary of the Mississippi Delta, with all the rich loam and plantations and wealth that that implied. On the west bank began the piney land, the poorer farmland that might be prettier, with its rolling hills, trees, and shade, but didn’t hold a candle to the loamy bottoms when it came to growing things.
    The land around West Cypress did produce a plentitude of trees, and as a result there grew up a paper mill, which, when the wind was wrong, which was most of the time, caused West Cypress to stink.
    It was in West Cypress that Rosalie Norris, the woman whom Jake Fine was coming to claim as his wife, resided—which was appropriate, for Rosalie, like the town in which she lived, had felt left out, put down and inferior all of her natural-born life.
    She was standing now on the platform of the bus station in Cypress, West Cypress being so much smaller and having so few visitors that the bus didn’t stop there. Rosalie nervously twisted the large luminescent brown beads of her necklace. A woman in a pink dress next to her, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, pushed a photograph of a uniformed young man in front of Rosalie.
    “That’s Fred. Isn’t he handsome? I can’t believe he’s finally coming home on furlough.” The woman stopped twitching for a moment and focused on Rosalie. “Do you have a picture of your husband?”
    Rosalie smiled vaguely at her. Her husband? A photograph? No, Jake had sent her a picture of the baby Emma, but she’d never seen a photograph of the man she had agreed to marry. He hadn’t sent one along with his letters, and she hadn’t asked. She’d thought it enough to insist that he come to West Cypress rather than her moving to New York. She knew she couldn’t—why, how could anyone—live there . She simply couldn’t move, not a woman from a town whose inhabitants referred to anyone from more than fifty miles away as “from off.” Jake had been amenable, saying that her prospects there, with her grocery store, sounded better than his, anyhow. So he hadn’t pushed him for a picture.
    She’d sent him one, though. She didn’t want to be a complete pig in a poke to this man. She just didn’t think