Eleanor Read Online Free Page B

mother calls upstairs. “Ellie! You better be ready!”
    “I’m ready, Mom,” she shouts back.  
    “Good,” her mother answers.
    Eleanor hears the door creak as Agnes begins to close it again, but then the sound stops.  
    “You shouldn’t be up there without your father,” her mother adds. “Come on down now.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    Eleanor jumps down from the stool. It rocks under her bottom, and she takes a moment to steady it before heading downstairs.  
    That’s when she notices the mailbox, its post snapped clean in half.

The attic door opens a little more, and Eleanor comes out, looking sheepish.
    “You know your dad wouldn’t like you being up there alone,” Agnes says.  
    Eleanor nods meekly, and stares at the floor.
    “No time for moping,” Agnes says. “I can’t find my galoshes.”
    “Your rain boots?” Eleanor asks. “They’re by the back door.”
    Agnes shifts her jaw and goes into her thoughts, then snaps her fingers. “That’s right—I was covering the petunias.”
    Eleanor turns to go back into her room, but Agnes puts a hand on her shoulder.
    “No goofing off,” she says to her daughter. “I need you both downstairs. We’re late.”
    Paul will be returning from Boca Raton in just under two hours. He had complained to Agnes on the phone last night that he’d only seen the inside of the Holiday Inn—his room, the banquet hall where the realty seminar was being held—for six days straight. He had put postcards in the mail, little quaint photographs of gulls on the sterns of sailboats, funny pictures of elderly women in bathing suits, but none had arrived yet.  
    “I don’t want to hear it,” Agnes said. “You’re in Florida. It’s your own damn fault if you can’t find the beach.”
    She knew the strain in her voice was obvious. Paul had taken this trip despite knowing that she was reaching her limits—he had traveled three times last month, and there were his regular nights drinking with Barn, and a few late showings in the new beachfront development—but he went anyway. Maybe he didn’t know how little patience Agnes had to work with in the beginning. Maybe he couldn’t tell that it was running out.
    “How are things going?” he asked.  
    But her problems wouldn’t matter much to him. The walls of his hotel room were so close to his face that he couldn’t see past them. Agnes and her problems weren’t real, not until he got home again and they were something he had to confront and solve.  
    “When you get home,” Agnes answered, “I’m driving to Portland, and I might spend all your money on wine and a suite of my own. And I might not ever come back.”
    “Agnes—”
    But she had hung up on him, and her frustration hadn’t diminished overnight.  
    She scurries downstairs now. On the landing behind her she can hear the bathroom door open, and Eleanor and Esmerelda murmuring together. Agnes takes the bottom step with a hop and almost falls down. The red runner that covers the hardwood floor bunches up under her feet, and she slides and grabs at the banister.  
    She steadies herself, and kicks the runner flat again.
    Her boots are exactly where Eleanor had said they were, like little sentries beside the sliding glass door. It’s one thing off her back, and she exhales slowly. The glass is cool and she rests her forehead against it and watches the rain falling in the back yard. Her breath fogs the glass, and then the fog quickly retreats when she inhales. Then it comes back with the next breath.  
    The back yard was supposed to be her place—her version of Paul’s attic. The petunias are lined up carefully beneath the plastic cover she put out the night before, safe from the rain, but now she doesn’t care. They’re only flowers. If they’d been destroyed by the rain, what would it matter? Paul would only tell her to get some more from the nursery. He wouldn’t consider the care she’d put into them, teasing them out of the ground,