The Invitation by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online

“Please tell me about your boring life; I need something to counteract the thrill and exhilaration of mine.”
    The letter had appealed to Jackie. She had received a lot of letters from people who had known her in the past, but many of those letters made her feel guilty, since the writers usually said that they doubted if she remembered them now that she was so famous. It was as though they thought that winning a race that was reported in the newspapers had instantly wiped out her memory. Or that every celebrity she met replaced an “insignificant” person from her past.
    Happily, Jackie had written Terri all about the race, about the people she had met, about what it was like to soar high above the crowd at air shows. At first, she wrote of the applause, but as the years passed, she began to write of the defeats and the heartaches. She wrote of people whom she’d seen die in fiery crashes, of men and women who passed in and out of her life. She wrote of Charley and how sometimes his irresponsibility nearly drove her mad. She told Terri that she envied her her quiet, peaceful life, envied her her husband, who was always there for her, who was interested in their home and the kids.
    Terri tried never to let on to Jackie how much their correspondence meant to her. The letters they exchanged were, at times, the best part of Terri’s life. She used all her creativity to make her letters to Jackie interesting and fun and, above all, light. It was wonderful to have a glamorous and exciting woman like Jackie write to her with such intimacy and such trust. Jackie began to see Terri as wise beyond her years, someone who had had a chance to go off and see the world, but who had wisely decided to stay at home and settle down and raise children.
    Terri never wrote anything to disabuse her friend of this notion. Oh, she was sarcastic at times, always making wisecracks about Ralph and the boys, but somehow Terri presented a picture of a life that was so good, so splendid, that she had to make jokes about it. If she told the truth she’d be able to do nothing but brag.
    The real truth was that Terri had married the first man who asked her because she was terrified of ending up an old maid. Although he wanted to wait to have children, she was so afraid Ralph would leave her that she got pregnant on their wedding night—or maybe a week or so before, she was never sure. She never wrote Jackie the truth about her life—that her husband spent most of his time with his men friends drinking beer and that when he was home he held a newspaper in front of his face and slept. Instead she wrote Jackie of a life that sounded as though it had come out of a book written by Betty Crocker. She told of the garden she and her husband planted so they would have fresh vegetables and herbs for the boys. The truth was that her husband had lost his fourth job in as many years and her father had planted a small garden in her back yard to help feed her family. Of course the boys were just like their father and wouldn’t touch a vegetable, so Terri had spent long hours canning produce to trade to a bachelor hog farmer for the meat the men loved. Terri wrote Jackie that Ralph always spent Sundays with his family; actually, he was sleeping off Saturday night. She told Jackie how quietly rewarding it was having a family. She painted a glorious picture of tiny loving hands bringing her flowers, of little mouths eating her delicious food. Terri poured every bit of her imagination into her narrations of an ideal existence.
    It was writing those letters, and planning what she was going to write, that got Terri through some of the roughest times of her life. While one big, sturdy boy was terrorizing the little girl next door and the second one was throwing his food against the kitchen wall, while Terri was in the bathroom throwing up because she was carrying the third one, she thought of how she’d present her life in letters to