Secret Language by Monica Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

when Connie joins them, as she often does, the stampede slows to a purposefulwalk, and the cloud of family presses on her less urgently, it seems, as if giving room to these two sisters and the shelf of silence they carry between them, their unarticulated sorrows.
    Connie has chosen the smallest bedroom in Faith and Joe’s house, at one end of the upstairs hall. At the other end Faith fusses over the bedroom she shares with Joe, papering the walls with tiny flowers. Joe Senior comes over to help her, lugging a utility table and oddly shaped instruments for hanging wallpaper. There is nothing the Fullers can’t do.
    Little by little the house fills with furniture—big, heavy things, gifts from Joe’s parents and brothers that are almost impossible to move. Their immutability thrills Faith, fills her with the notion that she has landed somewhere permanent. Though she thinks of it as Joe’s house—Joe is the one who checked it from top to bottom, Joe’s family furnished it, Joe’s humor and grace now fill it—she loves it already; she wants to die here.
    Connie’s new job, at New England Bonding & Casualty, makes for little conversation. She calls it New England Bondage & Slavery. After six months she’s still a file girl, running files from floor to floor, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She has plenty of friends, and plenty of plans: every week a brochure comes from a different airline.
    Faith is usually the first one home from work, and Connie arrives soon after. They cook something together from Phoebe’s store of recipes, working in silence, following Phoebe’s carefully printed directions. The recipes aren’t simple—Phoebe gives them a lot of credit—and there have been disasters. Joe comes in later, stopping at the sink to wash his hands in a mixture of dish soap and sugar that grinds away the grease from his father’s shop. Then he puts his hands on Faith’s cheeks, looking at her till she blushes, and kisses her long on the lips. His attentions still disarm her; every time he comes back to her at the end of the day, her heart registers a subtle surprise.
    “We sold a machine today,” he says. He’s beating cake batter in a huge bowl tucked under his arm like a football. Joe always makes dessert, evil, thick things that smolder under mounds of Redi-Whip,while Connie and Faith, dinner made, sit at the table and watch him. “I thought Dad was going to cry.”
    Faith smiles. Joe Senior keeps saying he’s going to retire and thinks every machine they ship out is his last.
    “Well,” Joe says. “That was
my
day. Did anybody else around here have a day?” They laugh. He goes through this every night; he tells them he feels like a stand-up comedian held captive by Trappist monks.
    Sometimes Connie goes out at night, with one of her boyfriends or a girl from work, leaving Faith and Joe together. But more often she stays in. Evenings in the new house are much like the evenings in the trailer, except for the husk of permanence that encases them: the immobile furniture, the thicket of hydrangea bushes hemming in the yard. They play cards at night, like old people. The family stops over not in bunches, but in manageable ones and twos. With Connie as an unwitting ally, Faith steeps her home in a comforting quiet, the only thing left in her life that is truly hers.
    The results are positive. Dr. Howe places a fatherly kiss on her cheek. “Go tell that nice husband of yours,” he says, but she doesn’t. She waits until the twelfth week, when, lying in bed, Joe runs his hand over the hard curve of her belly. His hand stops.
    “Faith?” His eyes are impossibly blue and tender. “Could you be pregnant?” She covers his hand, holding it against her stomach, until he yelps with joy, hoisting himself up on one elbow. “Why didn’t you
tell
me?”
    She simply laughs, relieved that he knows on his own. She doesn’t know what to do with life’s magical moments; she never expected these ordinary miracles.