AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Thanks!"
"It needs music," he warned. I laughed. "Okay, Uncle Simon."
"Watching you grow up is the same as watching a flower blossom," he said. He didn't smile or have an impish gleam in his eyes, as some men might when they said such a thing. It was a simple statement from his heart, and it brought tears to my eyes.
"Thank you," I said. He looked at his food.
"I'd better get back to the house. Grandad hates waiting for anyone when he's ready to eat."
Uncle Simon nodded. I glanced back at him as I left to descend the stairs. He was gazing at me with such a different expression, almost as if he wasn't completely sure I was who I claimed to be, almost as if he wondered if he had seen an apparition.
Only me, Uncle Simon, I thought. It's really only me.
Grandad's reaction was just about what I had expected. He took one look at me and turned to Mommy to declare that I looked like a cheap girl of the streets with my hair cut and styled this way.
"What do you know about such women?" Mommy snapped back at him.
Grandad actually turned a shade darker than beet red. "I know what I know," he stammered.
"Well, you don't know what is in style and what is not," Mommy said simply and shrugged.
Daddy's lips softened as his eyes turned to her with appreciation.
Grandad looked from one to the other and then at me. He lifted his thick right forefinger.
"Remember. There is no peace, saith the Lord, unto the wicked."
"Beware, old man," Mommy shot back at him, her eyes b
lazing. "He without sin cast the first stone."
She and Grandad fixed their eyes on each other in such a lock, it took my breath away. I felt an icy hand on my back as the clock ticked.
Then Grandad looked down at his food and Mommy continued serving dinner.
It was the quietest meal I could remember. My ears were filled with the pounding of my heart.
I felt as if I had opened another door in the mansion filled with mysteries when I stepped out of childhood into a woman's world. I had changed right before everyone's eyes.
And soon I would see that they had changed. too.
7 The Wages of Sin
We had no door chimes, no buzzer, only a stein of cast iron with a small ball of iron welded to it to drop against a metal plate. Grandad Forman made it himself. With so few visitors to our home, no one lobbied him to improve upon it. Waiting for Chandler's arrival, I was so nervous it felt like a small army of ants were parading up from my stomach to march around my drum-pounding heart. I debated going downstairs early and sitting by the front window, watching for his car coming up the drive, and then I thought that would look tacky or make me seem too anxious.
Instead. I remained in my room, staring at myself in the mirror, fidgeting with my hair, my clothes, alternating holding my breath with taking deep breaths, and listening hard for the sound of that metal doorknocker reverberating through our hallway. Grandad and Daddy were still out in the west field with Uncle Simon. Mommy was downstairs working on their dinner. I looked at the clock and remembered one of Mommy's favorite expressions: "A watched pot never boils." The hands of the clock indeed looked like they hadn't moved since my last glimpse.
"You're being foolish, Honey," I told myself, "You're acting like a child. It's just a date, just dinner and a show."
Just dinner and a show!
I've never been taken by a boy in my school to dinner and a show, I thought. What was this restaurant he was going to take me to? Would it be some fancy place, where all the other patrons would take one look at me and know I had never been there or anywhere like it before? Would they whisper and smile and laugh at the "girl just off the farm"? And then would they watch my every move to see if I knew which fork to use, did I talk with my mouth open or keep both elbows on the table? Would I eat too much or too little?
Would they laugh at my clothes, my hair, my makeup? Would they know Chandler Maxwell's family and wonder what Chandler was doing with someone so unsophisticated? Would I see all this ridicule in their faces and simply burst out in tears and run from the table?
It was easier milking cows or shoveling chicken manure. I thought.
The metal clang echoing through the house made my heart stop and start. It sounded again, and Mommy called up to me.
