Mercy Train by Rae Meadows Read Free Book Online Page B

place, yet that was part of it, wasn’t it? To be the city girl, returned. She looked out at the grassy field of newly sown winter wheat behind the barn, owned by the Jensens now, and she was sorry that she didn’t feel a loss for the land itself. It was shameful, she thought.
    â€œI think the guests would like to make their condolences,” Iris said.
    Her mother shrugged. “They’ll live.” She unlatched the metal gate. “Here, hold this. I’m going to let Elmer back in.”
    The mottled pig had made a low grumble and heaved itself onto its tiny feet. Iris had held the gate, unsteady in her high heels, trying to spare her dress the filth.
    â€œYou look like you’re cold, Iris,” her mother had said. “Why don’t you go on in. I’ve got this. Get yourself some tea. I’ll be fine.”
    *   *   *
    Iris folded her book and set it down on the floor, her arm shaky with fatigue. Her mother was always fine, even when she wasn’t, and Iris had never bothered to distinguish between the two. It had been easier to believe in her mother’s stoicism than to risk a glimpse of her vulnerability. I’m thirty years too late, she thought, rolling onto her side.
    Through the window she could see patches of sky through the shifting clouds, the air warmer now, the rain forgotten. She slid her feet off the couch and onto the floor. Get up, Iris, get up, she told herself. Don’t wallow. Don’t waste the day. I’m a dying woman, she answered. I’m allowed to do as I please.

 
    SAM
    She would start by making the pound cake. With Ella breast-feeding, Sam could easily eat the whole cake by herself. She could not eat enough these days. By the time Jack got back from campus, all that would be left would be a nondescript, homey baking smell, enough to make him wonder at the source but not enough to ask about it.
    She pulled out the flour and sugar and then checked the refrigerator. She had a little less than a pound of butter and nine eggs. How was she to weigh eggs? Or flour and sugar, for that matter? She closed her eyes hefting the butter in one hand and the eggs in the other. Close enough.
    She rummaged through a cupboard for the bread pan she inherited from her mother’s kitchen, along with the Mixmaster and the velvet-lined chest of silver that had begun, the last time she had looked, to tarnish. Sam had dumped the rest of her mother’s belongings into boxes and delivered them to the Salvation Army in Fort Myers, along with the furniture, the seascape paintings, and the driftwood frame mirrors. She had saved only a yellow glider chair and a white dresser that were both now in Ella’s room, along with a few other odds and ends she carried in her bag on the flight home. When Sam’s parents had divorced, her mother had gotten rid of all the antiques she had spent her married years collecting, the refinished chests and colonial rocking chairs and iron beds. She had left Chicago, moved to Florida—to Sanibel Island—and bought a condo, where she had lived until her death last year, four months before Ella was born.
    The pan wasn’t anywhere. How could that be? Sam thought. She’d last used it to make pumpkin bread for some English Department thing. She bristled. Jack must not have brought it home. Domestic details were not part of his frame of vision. She was pretty sure that in the five years they had been married he’d never once bought toilet paper, garbage bags, or laundry detergent. Or soap. Or toothpaste. You chose to put your baby’s needs and the home first, she said sometimes, to calm herself. But she knew it wasn’t really a choice. Sam still felt at the mercy of her biology, and sometimes she quietly raged against not having a say about the intensity of feeling she had for Ella. It was like she had given birth to one of her own vital organs, requiring a subversion of her self that was