Lone Star Read Online Free

North Dakota, reinvented herself constantly into something new. She had wanted to be a dancer when she was young, but then she met Jimmy and wanted to be a wife. After many years as a wife, she wanted to be a mother. And after many years as a mother of one, she wanted to be a mother of two.
    Jimmy’s favorite, he said, was when Lang took up tap dancing. He built her a wooden platform; she bought herself a pair of black Capezios size 5, some CDs, and taught herself how to tap dance. That was noisy.
    And not as delicious as baking, which was the current phase, and Chloe’s favorite after gardening. Jimmy Devine liked it, too, but groused that he was gaining two pounds a week because of Lang’s buttery hobby. Chloe thought her dad might teasingly mention the extra pounds Lang herself had put on around her five-foot frame, now that she wasn’t tap dancing. But no. Just last week, Jimmy said as he dug into Lang’s cream puffs (made with half-and-half, not milk, by the way), “Sweet potato, how do you bake so much and yet stay so thin?”
    And Chloe’s mother had tittered!
    How to explain to her parents that it was unseemly for a grown woman of advancing years to titter when her husband of nearly three decades paid her a halfhearted compliment by calling her the name of a red starchy root vegetable?
    Chloe walked in, set down her school bag, pulled off her boots, and walked through the short corridor, past her parents’ bedroom, past the bedroom that no one ever went into anymore, past the bathroom, into the open area. She put down her lunchbox on the kitchen counter where it would be cleaned and prepped for tomorrow. Something smelled heavenly. Chloe didn’t want to admit it, because she didn’t want to encourage her mother in any way. What her mother needed was a tamping down of enthusiasm, not a fanning of the fire. Her mother and Blake shared that in common.
    â€œDoesn’t that smell divine?” Lang giggled, turned around, and with floury hands, patted Chloe’s cheeks. “I only make divine things for my divine girl.” Lang was shorter than Chloe, making even Chloe seem tall and svelte by comparison. Otherwise mother and daughter had many physical features in common. The one Chloe was most grateful for was her brown hair. It was straw-straight, shining, streaked with sunlight. There was nothing she did to make it great. It just was. Every day washed, brushed, clean, unfussy, thin-spun silk falling from her head. She wore no makeup, to differentiate herself from the senior girls who were all about the heavy eyeliner, the flimsytanks, the one-size-too-small jeans, and three-inch (or higher!) mules in which they clomped through the Fryeburg Academy halls, always in danger of falling over or tripping, and perhaps that was the point. Sexy but helpless. Chloe kept her body to herself and walked in sensible shoes. Her face, unblemished and fair, suffered slightly from this pretend plainness, but there was no hiding the upper curve of her cheekbones or her wide-set eyes that tilted slightly upward, always in a smile. She had inherited her Irish lips from her father, but her eyes and cheeks from her mother, and because of that, her face, just like her body, wasn’t quite in proportion. The ratio of eyes to lips was not in balance, just as the ratio of body to breasts was not in balance. There was not enough body for the milk-fed breasts she had been cursed with. There might have been a genetic component to the comical chaos inside her—to her math abilities colliding with her existential confusion—but there was simply no cosmic excuse for her palmfuls of breasts. That was the feature she was least grateful for.
    Chloe blamed her mother.
    It was only right.
    She blamed her mother for almost everything.
    Chloe brushed the white powder off her face. “Whatcha makin’?”
    â€œLinzer tarts.”
    â€œDoesn’t smell like Linzer tarts.” Chloe