If Wishes Were Horses Read Online Free Page B

always been free with compliments.
    Etta stared. He appeared so real, as if she could touch him, grinning that sensuous, touching grin, the one that could make a woman take leave of her senses and be glad to do so. Oh, never let it be said that Roy Rivers had only been a taker. He had always given, as well.
    His voice came to her again, “Ah, Etta . . . I still love you . . . forgive me . . . I need you, Precious,” and his green eyes were as desperate and pleading as they ever had been.
    Seeing them so clearly, Etta’s breath stopped in her throat.
    It had all been so complicated between them, something she could never put into words and something most people could never begin to understand. Roy had loved her, and knowing this had held Etta to him. His attentions to other women had had nothing to do with his love of her. She had made a vow to be his wife, until death do them part, and she hadn’t been able to step over that vow. She had not been able to turn her back on him, because she had come to understand him so well, and to know his need of her went as deep and thorough as blood, and that he most assuredly would have gone crazy and died had she left him. She had held on and kept trying to save him, until she was on the brink of dying herself. And she had loved him.
    “I can’t help you anymore, Roy,” Etta said flatly to his image that was beginning to fade, his hand stretching toward her. “You’ve just gone too far this time, honey.”
    Before the image was completely gone, she turned away and went down the stairs.
----
Chapter 3
    Mr. Alvin Leedy himself, the eldest of the three brothers who owned the Leedy Funeral Home, had brought the limousine and stood holding the door open. Etta went carefully down the brick stairs. She was experiencing a growing light-headedness. It was a disconcerting sensation of suffocation, and also of being in a dream, where all objects possessed a gray aura. It vaguely occurred to her that the layers of black veiling could be contributing to these sensations, but she wasn’t about to lift the veil, as she felt more and more comforted, hidden, by it all the time. It was the closest she could get to being in the bed with the covers over her head.
    She slid into the backseat. The limousine was warm and smelled musty, closed like a closet, or a coffin. She rolled down the window, hard and fast.
    Latrice, with several heavy breaths, slipped into the seat beside her, glanced quickly around, and made a sound of approval. Etta turned her face to the window, trying to catch the air. It poured in as the limousine took off fast enough to press them back into the seat, cruising over the gravel driveway like it was hardtop, tossing up a good puff of white dust behind.
    Etta had never in her life ridden in a limousine. She felt as if she were caught in a surreal dream and would at any moment wake up and turn over and there would be Roy, his head on the pillow that was scrunched the way he liked to make it, his green eyes eating her up and his hand slipping onto her breast in the manner of a man intent on having his way. But then he would say, “Are you gonna go get me some breakfast?” like a little cajoling boy, and she would have to laugh.
    She clung to these good pictures. The others, the hours of waiting and looking for Roy to come home, the anger and hurt when he finally did, smelling of another woman’s perfume, passed across her mind, but she pushed them aside. Pull the veil, close her eyes, do not see because she could not bear the hurt right now.
    Just then the limousine came to a stop, hard and jarring, causing Etta to put one hand out to catch herself. Latrice let out a “My land!”
    A light blue pickup truck, a recent model but well used, with a wooden rack in the back for hauling stock, was stopped right in the entry from the highway. The driver—a cowboy sort wearing a dark hat—stared at them through a dirty windshield, and Mr. Leedy, Etta, and Latrice stared back. Then