Monday's Child by Patricia Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

peaceful. She supposed that she should feel guilty about it, but early morning had come to be her favorite time of day, those hours before Dave or Jill were awake.
    It wasn’t that she wanted the house to herself—in fact she was alone more often than she cared to be—but rather in the morning her world felt safer than at any other time. She could walk through the quiet rooms and enjoy her solitude without having to worry that somewhere, one of them might be needing her.
    Knowing where they were comforted her.
    She didn’t consider herself an over-protective mother, but since the first day of kindergarten, she’d been nervous about Jill.
    Perhaps it was because Jill was adopted, but she’d never been able to shake the feeling that the child could be taken away. It was as if, since she hadn’t endured the pain to bring her daughter into the world, she had no real claim to her.
    Legal papers weren’t the same as the bond of shared blood.
    What if someday, Jill’s natural mother showed up on their doorstep?
    The law, she knew, was on her side, but despite centuries of trying, man still wasn’t able to legislate feelings, to control human emotion. A child couldn’t be forced to love.
    Georgia frowned.
    Jill was fine. She might not be as demonstrative as other children, but Georgia attributed that to the fact that she’d been without a real family for the first year of her life.
    Even now, it upset her that her poor baby had been shunted from home to home. What possessed those people to reject an innocent child? Had they no heart?
    If only she and Dave had been the first.
    Dave.
    He hadn’t come home yet when she went to bed at eleven. Nor was he in when she woke shortly after one.
    She’d gotten up and stood at the window, thinking she’d heard a car. She couldn’t see through the fog, but she stayed there, shivering from the cold, willing him home.
    Finally, a pair of headlights turned onto the street, but it was only the doctor.
    She’d gone back to bed then.
    Sometime during the night, Dave apparently tiptoed in, undressed, and crawled into bed beside her. He was sleeping with his back to her when the alarm went off at six, oblivious to the sound.
    When she looked to see that he was all right, she noticed the smile on his face.
    Dreaming about what?
    The teacup rattled as she put it on the saucer, and she realized that her hands were shaking.
    Annoyed at the turn her thoughts had taken, she got up and went into the kitchen to start breakfast.
    While Dave was in the shower and Jill ate her breakfast, Georgia went into the bedroom. She took the vacation fund piggybank off the dresser and sat on the bed.
    She turned the bank upside down and used a butter knife to guide the coins out the narrow opening.
    A nickel, a dime, another nickel.
    It was slow going, but she needed enough to give to Jill so that she could buy lunch at school. Normally Jill turned her nose up at cafeteria food, but today, as befitting the day before a holiday, there was a special menu, a choice of hamburgers or hotdogs, with potato chips, fresh fruit, and ice cream bars.
    Overall, the food represented a nutritional wasteland, but there probably wasn’t a child at Meadowbrook who could resist it.
    And it saved her from having to make lunch.
    “Ah ha,” she said as a quarter dropped out. “Come to Mama.”
    Three pennies tried to come through the slot at the same time and became wedged. She turned the bank right side up and forced them back inside.
    “I haven’t got all day,” she told the pig sternly, and shook him for luck. She was rewarded with another quarter and two dimes.
    Thank heavens today was payday at the Library. On her break she would make a deposit to cover the checks she’d mailed yesterday, and hold out enough cash to pay for her own meals next week, Easter week.
    It was too bad she wouldn’t be able to take time off from work like she had last year, but they needed the money. She hated to leave Jill alone, but she