Dollenganger 01 Flowers In the Attic Read Online Free Page A

your age that no one ever has come back from heaven. As for us, we'll make do the best we can without him-- and that doesn't mean escaping reality by not facing up to it."
I watched her rise from her chair and begin to take things from the refrigerator to start breakfast.
"Momma .. ." I began again, feeling my way along cautiously lest she turn hard and angry again. "Will we be able to go on, without him 9 "
"I will do the best I can to see that we survive," she said dully, flatly.
"Will you have to go to work now, like Mrs. Johnston?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Life holds all sorts of surprises, Cathy, and some of them are unpleasant, as you are finding out. But remember always you were blessed to have for almost twelve years a father who thought you were something very special."
"Because I look like you," I said, still feeling some of that envy I always had, because I came in second after her.
She threw me a glance as she rambled through the contents of the jam-packed fridge. "I'm going to tell you something now, Cathy, that I've never told you before. You look very much as I did at your age, but you are not like me in your personality. You are much more aggressive, and much more determined. Your father used to say that you were like his mother, and he loved his mother."
"Doesn't everybody love their mother?"
"No," she said with a queer expression, "there are some mothers you just can't love, for they don't want you to love them."
She took bacon and eggs from the refrigerator, then turned to take me in her arms. "Dear Cathy, you and your father had a very special close relationship, and I guess you must miss him more because of that, more than Christopher does, or the twins."
I sobbed against her shoulder. "I hate God for taking him , He should have lived to be an old man! He won't be there when I dance and when Christopher is a doctor. Nothing seems to matter now that he's gone."
"Sometimes," she began in a tight voice, "death is not as ten-i- ble as you think. Your father will never grow old, or infirm. He'll always stay young; you'll remember him that way-- young, handsome, strong. Don't cry anymore, Cathy, for as your father used to say, there is a reason for everything and a solution for every problem, and I'm trying, trying hard to do what I think best."
We were four children stumbling around in the broken pieces of our grief and loss. We would play in the back garden, trying to find solace in the sunshine, quite unaware that our lives were soon to change so drastically, so dramatically, that the words "backyard" and "garden" were to become for us synonyms for heaven--and just as remote.
It was an afternoon shortly after Daddy's funeral, and Christopher and I were with the twins in the backyard. They sat in the sandbox with small shovels and sand pails. Over and over again they transferred sand from one pail to another, gibbering back and forth in the strange language only they could understand. Cory and Carrie were fraternal rather than identical twins, yet they were like one unit, very much satisfied with each other. They built a wall about themselves so they were the castle- keeps, and full guardians of their larder of secrets. They had each other and that was enough.
The time for dinner came and went. We were afraid that now even meals might be cancelled, so even without our mother's voice to call us in, we caught hold of the dimpled, fat hands of the twins and dragged them along toward the house. We found our mother seated behind Daddy's big desk; she was writing what appeared to be a very difficult letter, if the evidence of many discarded beginnings meant anything. She frowned as she wrote in longhand, pausing every so often to lift her head and stare off into space.
"Momma," I said, "it's almost six o'clock. The twins are growing hungry."
"In a minute, in a minute," she said in an off-hand way. "I'm writing to your grandparents who live in Virginia. The neighbors have brought us food enough for a week--you could put