A Change of Heart Read Online Free Page A

day, glancing at her from the biographies. The next morning he was back, asking permission to call on her that evening.
    It was late spring. He arrived at her house a little before eight. She’d hurried home from work to shower, iron a new dress, and dab perfume on her wrist. They sat on her porch swing. He’d grown up in a small town just like this one, he’d told her, then had graduated from high school, was sent to Korea, came home alive and grateful, and had been with the phone company ever since. Never married.
    He visited every night for a week and sat on her porch. On the fifth night he held her hand, the next night they kissed, and two nights later she invited him inside for a game of Rummikub, even though she knew people would talk. Two months passed, he proposed, and she accepted. The date was set for early November. Then there was a car wreck. He lasted two days at a hospital in the city, all alone, before she managed to find him. He was buried the day they were to be married, in South Cemetery by the Co-op.
    She has the wedding rings they bought at the jewelry store in Cartersburg. She keeps them in a jewelry box on her bureau, and at night, when she is especially lonesome, she holds them and remembers better days. She has one picture of him, which she keeps next to her bed—the picture accompanying their engagement announcement in the Herald. But that was a long time ago, and people have forgotten. They walk past his grave and see his name and wonder who he was and why he’s buried there. No one remembers, except Miss Rudy.
    She has a handkerchief he gave her the night he proposed. She was crying, and he pulled it from his pocket to dab her tears. She kept it to launder, but never got around to giving it back.
    All of that came to mind while she was standing in Kivett’s Five and Dime, these unbidden memories, never far from the surface.
    She thanked Nora for the wedding book. When she returned to the library, she phoned Deena, asking her to stop past that evening on her way home from the Legal Grounds.
    Deena knocked on her door at fifteen after eight. Miss Rudy was washing the supper dishes. She invited Deena in, poured them glasses of tea, and then gave her the book. They sat at the kitchen table, thumbing through the book and discussing the upcoming nuptials. Miss Rudy asked if she had something borrowed.
    “What do you mean?”
    “For your wedding day,” Miss Rudy said. “You have to wear something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”
    “Oh, that. I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
    Miss Rudy rose from the table, walked into her bedroom, reached into the top drawer of her bureau, and pulled the handkerchief from it. She went back into the kitchen and pressed it into Deena’s hand. “You can borrow this, if you wish.”
    Then, for reasons she still doesn’t understand, she told Deena how she’d come to possess it. She regretted it immediately. Deena began to cry.
    “Oh, I should never have told you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad. Please forgive me.”
    “Don’t be silly. I’m glad you told me,” Deena said, leaning over to put her arm around Miss Rudy. “How difficult that must have been for you.”
    They sat that way the longest time, Deena patting Miss Rudy. A silence enveloped them. In the front room, the mantel clock ticked on, as it always had, with a certain detached cadence. Across the alley, Uly Grant yelled out the back door for his sons to come in for the night.
    “Just look at us,” Miss Rudy said, “sitting here being melancholy when the happiest day of your life is fast approaching. Let’s be done with these silly tears.”
    Miss Rudy stood and smoothed out her dress, then carried the tea glasses into the kitchen. Deena rose and followed her, standing in the doorway. “I want you to be in my wedding.”
    “Excuse me?” Miss Rudy said.
    “I would be honored if you would be my maid of honor.”
    “Me? Why would you want a