The Lost Husband by Katherine Center Read Free Book Online

kitchen table, dunking whole-wheat pancakes in the shapes of their initials into warm plum jam. Jean was frying bacon at the stove. The kids informed me it was a New Year’s feast. And everybody was acting as if they’d all done this a million times before.
    “Bacon?” Jean asked, tilting the pan at me. “It’s homegrown.”
    “Maybe just coffee,” I said. I was happy to notice a delightfully modern and high-tech coffeemaker. “Nice coffeemaker.”
    “I don’t mess around with coffee,” Jean said.
    “Mom,” Abby said, “come eat this jam.”
    “Aunt Jean made it herself,” Tank added. He had a clown mouth of it.
    I sat across from them at the table with my coffee and rested my hands around the warm mug. “You want to hear something amazing?”
    “What?” they asked in unison.
    “There are two children at this table, but zero children woke me up last night.”
    Tank started to cackle.
    “How is that possible?” I asked.
    “Mom,” Abby said in her most informative voice, “Tank slept all the way through the night last night.”
    Tank was proud. “Yup.”
    I gave him a high five. “How on earth did you manage it?”
    Tank stuffed a whole pancake into his mouth. “Well,” he said, all muffled, “I just really wanted to see the pirate treasure. So I pretended I was sleeping until I accidentally was.”
    Jean set down a plate of bacon. “It’s a busy day today,” she said. “The children and I will dig for—and hopefully find—massive amounts of pirate treasure. And you’ll stay here and learn about the goats.”
    “If you’re digging for treasure,” I said, “how do I learn about the goats?”
    Jean smiled. “O’Connor.”
    “Who’s O’Connor?”
    “He’s kind of like my farm manager.” She stepped over to the kitchen window and pointed out. I followed her gaze to see the shaggiest man I’d ever laid eyes on. He was Muppet shaggy. Caveman shaggy. Bigfoot shaggy. His furry head seemed to overpower his entire body, and even his jeans and his work boots seemed shaggy. When he turned and I saw his face, it was all shag, too. Except for a pair of blue eyes and a vertical strip of nose, his beard had taken over his entire face.
    “That’s not a farm manager,” I said. “That’s Chewbacca.”
    “The beard is a shame,” Jean agreed. “And the lack of—”
    “Hygiene?”
    “Grooming,” she finished. “But he’s handsome underneath, I promise.”
    I didn’t care if he was handsome or not. As long as he didn’t have fleas.
    “He’s very handy,” Jean went on. “If there were an Olympics for handiness, he’d have a gold medal.”
    “There should be an Olympics for handiness,” I said, still watching out the window. And I knew, in the way that sometimes you just know things, that I’d pleased her by saying so.
    Jean went back to work, picking up breakfast dishes and submersing them in soapy water, but I continued to watch him for a minute as he filled the dogs’ water bowls. Then, as if he could feel my eyes on him, he turned, glanced at the window, and—to my horror, since I was wearing only a very thin cotton nightgown—started making his way up to the house.
    I sent the kids to get dressed, but before I could scurry off myself, he was standing on the back porch by the open door, looking in at us in the kitchen. I could see up close that he had mud from his boots to his knees.
    At that moment, I remembered something. I was wearing underpants with little strawberries on them. I knew for a fact—as Danny had pointed out many times—that a person could easily see, and even count, every single strawberry through this particular nightgown. I held absolutely still in the hopes of disappearing into the background.
    “Gate’s fixed,” he said to Jean, as if nobody else were in the room.
    “Thank you,” she said, moving toward the door and waving me over to join her. I crossed my arms over my chest and stepped forward. She opened the screen door so we could all seeone