Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman Read Free Book Online Page A

she could stand it if he came all that way with Emma, took one look at her and then carried the baby away.
    The tinted photo that she sent him had been taken in her best brown suit with the same brown beads that she was wearing this evening. The long narrow face that looked out of it was pleasant, with a prominent nose, hazel eyes and a pretty smile. She looked exactly her age, which was thirty-six. Her brown hair was dressed in a pompadour. She was tall, as all her family was, tall and lean, with long bones.
    Rosalie Norris was never going to win any beauty contests, but then she wasn’t trying to. She knew exactly who and what she was and what she could expect from life. She hoped that wanting Emma wasn’t expecting too much.
    “Do you think I’ve lost my mind?” she’d asked her sister Janey the week before.
    “You don’t have to marry him if you don’t like him.”
    “Then I won’t get the baby.”
    Janey nodded. “Well, that’s true. I know that means a lot to you. There are always other babies, though, Ro. And you still could have one of your own.”
    Rosalie shook her head. There had been a baby, but Janey didn’t know that. No one knew. That was a while ago—and had almost killed her. She’d paid the price, but then, as she’d always known, nothing in this world comes free.
    The past few years had been a bit easier. Sometimes she allowed herself to lock the grocery store’s front door at eight rather than staying on till ten. And on those nights when she went to bed early, she’d begun to dream, not the nightmares she’d had since that baby, but of another baby, another child. Of course, she would want one that was already here, one that she wouldn’t be responsible for birthing but could raise as her own. Most people seemed to look at it the other way around, as if the birthing were the important part and the raising just incidental, but not Rosalie. She didn’t give a hoot about the sex, and the birthing, or even the man. All that was incidental.
    She shifted and fidgeted in the still-warm October air outside the bus terminal, pacing back and forth, looking at her watch. She had always been impatient, but if she’d waited this long, she guessed, biting her bottom lip and trying to keep her hands still, she could wait just a little bit longer.
    She couldn’t believe that it was only two months ago that she had received the first letter from the man named Jake Fine who was going to be on the bus, the man whose daughter was the blue-eyed blonde baby girl she had already fallen in love with.
    In his letters he had laid it out plain and simple. He was looking for a mother for his daughter, for a good home, and that was enough for him. Well, that was enough for her too. She had learned to expect nothing of the world but grief, and any joy that came along was what in the southern part of the state the Cajuns called lagniappe—something extra and unexpected.
    She opened her purse and looked again at the photograph of the smiling baby propped up against her daddy’s wrist.
    Wasn’t she like a little doll?
    Rosalie closed her eyes, and the lady beside her in the pink dress disappeared. The station disappeared. Inside her head a doll danced.
    * * *
    The Christmas morning of Rosalie’s eleventh year had begun at dawn like every other morning she had ever known.
    “You girls get up in here,” her mother, Virgie, stood at the bedroom door and called.
    Rosalie rolled over into the still-sleeping body of her sister Lucille, who groaned and then, “Phewy,” Lucille wrinkled her nose in disgust. Nancy, the third and youngest sister in the bed, had wet again, as she did almost every night.
    Esther, Janey and Florence were still tangled together like puppies in the other cast-iron double bed in the square unpainted room.
    “I’m not telling you girls again,” Virgie said. “Get up now. There’s chores to be done.”
    Rosalie fought her way out from between her sisters and slipped her white cotton