Billie Standish Was Here Read Online Free Page A

and set a full plate in front of him. “Curtis appears to have the day off work and has decided to grace us with his presence,” she told me, “so would you get silverware for all of us, please?” And one second after she sliced those words off the edge of a tight little smile, she threw him the hateful look I’d seen once before. The one that had made me drop a glass and break it.
    Then she turned and started filling the next plate.
    I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. This was worse than home with Mama in one of her moods and I didn’t know if I could choke down food at a table with the two of them.
    I was trying to conjure up an exit line when Miss Lydia said, “Billie Marie?” Both of them were looking at me, waiting. I got the forks and knives, dealt them out, and slid into my chair.
    It was a different house. Miss Lydia was tuned up tight as a fiddle string and I was vibrating in close harmony. My knuckles went white holding my fork and I wasn’t doing much with my plate but rearranging it. Miss Lydia looked to be doing the same. She kept her eyes down and never looked at Curtis again before he left.
    He ate faster than any person I’ve ever seen, but even so, his manners were neat almost to the point of finicky. Outside of TV, I had never seen anyone raise their pinky as they lifted their glass and I never could have imagined it with a dirty fingernail. For all his hurry, I didn’t see a speck of food go anywhere it shouldn’t, and his napkin was a white flash between his mouth and his lap.
    For some reason, I remembered the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” who put on clothes and talked and was a good enough imitator to pass for a human being. That had scared the bejeezus out of me as a little kid.
    Nobody had said another word when Curtis laid his folded napkin beside his plate and stood up. He took one last drink of tea, pushed his chair in, cleared his throat and said, “Ladies.” Without looking at either of us, he stalked out the back door as hunch-shouldered and bowlegged as any cowboy heading into the wind.
    Miss Lydia closed her eyes for about five seconds, then opened them and smiled. “Clear that plate for me, would you?” She nodded toward Curtis’s place. “I’d do it myself, but my food would be cold by the time I got myself up and back into my chair.” We both chuckled and I jumped up and piled his place setting in the sink.
    When I sat down again, it was like nobody else had been there. Miss Lydia made some comment about the weather and we fell to talking like we always did while we ate.Things were back to normal until I asked in the course of things when it was that she had moved to Cumberland.
    Just like that the air was almost too thick to take in and Miss Lydia seemed frozen, staring at the spot Curtis had occupied. Her mouth moved without sound like she was trying on words. I didn’t know what to do—it had seemed like such a nothing question.
    Her words came slowly. “Mr. Jenkins inherited this house about the time Curtis left for college.” She cleared her throat. “It seemed like a good time for a fresh start. . . .”
    Curtis went to college? Maybe I wondered out loud, because she went on to say, “. . . for three months. Then he showed up here one weekend . . . there was an accident. . . .”
    I tried to help her along. “The one with the girl.”
    She nodded and it was all there on her face.
    My heart was pounding to beat the band and I knew I should change the subject, but I just had to ask. “But why . . . Miss Lydia, why do you take him in?”
    She shook her head. “Guilty conscience, I suppose.” She looked at me with eyes that held no life.
    I started sputtering. “Oh, but Miss Lydia, no—you—I mean, it’s not—”
    She waved her hand halfheartedly. “No, I know I