Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh Read Free Book Online Page A

like. She watched, fascinated by the boy’s clutching hands, the soft chewing movements of his jaw.
    Next to Birdie the stout woman was looking too. “Heavens to Betsy,” she murmured.
    The bus trundled to a stop; a few passengers filed past. The boy and girl hurried to the front of the bus, flushed and giggling, the girl tugging at her short skirt.
    “Good riddance,” said the woman in the hat. She shifted indignantly in her seat. “There used to be such a thing as privacy, at least in our day.”
    Birdie looked closely at the woman. Her face was heavily powdered; she looked fifty, maybe older. She thinks we’re the same age, Birdie thought. Birdie was twenty-six years old.
    The bus stopped at the bottom of the street; the doors opened, admitting a blast of fresh air. Birdie got to her feet and stepped down to the curb, crossed the street, and climbed the hill. The sun heated the dark crown of her hat. She thought of the bottle of wine chilling in the refrigerator, so cold it would make her teeth hurt.
    She glanced at her watch. She’d told Miss Semple she’d pick the children up at four. She had another ten minutes.
     
    D RINKING, SHE THOUGHT of Evelyn Luck.
    She hadn’t thought of Evelyn in years. It was a special gift of hers: the ability to rewrite past disasters, to unhappen them in her mind. The worst debacles, her memory simply refused to record, so that there were periods of her life she barely recalled at all: her mother’s illness, the long months after her death. Birdie’s memories of Missouri stopped after the first year, when the gossip about Ken and Evelyn Luck started.
    Birdie had never met Evelyn, but she’d seen her around: a small,narrow-shouldered woman with smooth dark hair and a sad, beautiful face. Evelyn and her husband were schoolteachers in the town; the year after Charlie was born they came to Ken for marriage counseling. It was a part of the pastor’s job that Birdie couldn’t fathom: strangers telling him their most intimate problems, asking his advice. She often wondered what Ken said to them, how their own short union could have given him any insight into other people’s marriages. Most of the time she didn’t feel married at all. They were apart all day; at night they slept in twin beds, Birdie in the bed that had belonged to Ken’s dead brother.
    Ken saw the Lucks twice a week at his office behind the church, a tidy room full of his father’s old books. After a time he started seeing them separately. Once the Lucks had divorced, Evelyn continued to come for counseling, spending hours at a time in the pastor’s office.
    At first Birdie ignored the whispers at choir practice, the conversations that stopped when she came into the room. Then, little by little, she retreated. She quit the choir, the Sunday school, the church suppers and rummage sales. Pregnant again, she had a perfect excuse. She was in her fifth month when Ken was called before the parish council and asked to resign.
    He never told her what was said at the meeting, and she never asked. He made vague references to wagging tongues, vicious gossip. She nodded sympathetically. That spring he wrote to an old seminary friend who’d become the dean of Pennington College. His parents would get along fine, he explained. By summer they were on the road to Richmond.
    Life was different at the college, at least for Ken. He taught two classes a week, theology and Scripture; the rest of the time he spent in his campus office, counseling feuding roommates, arrangingtutors for those failing math. He no longer comforted the sick and dying; instead he served on the Student Life Committee, planning prayer breakfasts and homecoming dances. He grew his hair, bought colored shirts to replace his old white ones. He became friendly with Walter Whitacre, the college president; they sang together in the faculty choir, and Whitacre’s daughter Dinah sometimes baby-sat for Jody and Charlie.
    Birdie spent the days alone. To her surprise