Love Mercy Read Online Free

had three granddaughters: Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Faith Leann. Their names screamed out their mama’s unfulfilled aspirations. Pursuing her singing career was the reason Karla Rae and Tommy had moved to Nashville. Love quickly calculated her granddaughter’s ages; Patsy would be nineteen now, Loretta would be eighteen and Faith would be fourteen. Faith had been a baby when Tommy was killed. He’d been driving to the Piggly Wiggly to buy diapers for her when a truck broadsided his little Toyota.
    Lord, don’t let it be Faith, Love automatically sent up a prayer before catching herself. She’d stubbornly been avoiding conversations with God since Cy had died. Still, she didn’t take back the prayer, despite a slight feeling of guilt, because the mental image of a fourteen-year-old girl bearing Tommy’s sweet, round face hitchhiking on a desolate highway made her blood freeze in her veins.
    “Eighteen? Twenty?” Magnolia guessed.
    “It must be Patsy or Loretta,” she said, only slightly relieved. “I’ll walk on over. Tell her any food she orders is on my tab. Maybe she doesn’t have any money and is too embarrassed to say so.”
    “Okay, but my guess is she has one of those eating disorders so popular with movie stars and whatnot.”
    “Let’s hope she’s just broke.” Love wouldn’t have a clue about how to deal with an eating disorder.
    After she hung up, she thought of a question she should have asked Magnolia. Did the girl have red hair? If so, she would probably be Patsy. Loretta had brown hair, like Tommy. At least she did all those years ago. So many years, it felt like someone else’s life.
    She walked over to the kitchen window that looked out onto her small, grass-covered backyard. Morro Bay and the Pacific Ocean looked like a huge sheet of gray steel. So flat you could fry bacon on it, she could imagine Cy’s voice saying in his calm, even baritone that always held a soupçon of laughter.
    Soupçon. Now there’s a great word. Maybe she could work it into “Love’s View,” the column she wrote once a month for San Celina County Life , a local magazine delivered free to everyone in the county. Well, it wasn’t actually a column, she’d tell people, more of a columnette or a column-lite. Though she loved to read and found individual words fascinating, she didn’t actually like to write, so what she did was take a photograph of something in San Celina County and then write a short essay about it. The shorter the better. Frankly, she’d be happier if she didn’t have to write anything at all, just let the photograph speak for itself. Whenever she tried to explain what she was trying to say with a photo, it seemed to diminish the picture. It was like admitting she’d failed.
    January’s photo and column were done. She’d taken a picture of an elegantly graceful spider with patterns on her back that reminded Love of a Navajo rug. She—for some reason Love thought of all spiders as female—had built an intricate web at the side of the house, and Love had been observing its progress for days. Her photograph caught it early in the morning, the sun-bright dewdrops on the filaments twinkling like diamonds. In the web, an unfortunate fly awaited its ghastly fate. Her simple caption, “Bless this food we are about to receive,” was sure to be misunderstood, causing people to write in to the magazine demanding that she explain what she meant. Some people would be certain that she was somehow being blasphemous or, even worse, political (though they wouldn’t actually be able to explain why). The boys at the Rowdy Pelican saloon would give her the thumbs-up when she delivered their weekly two dozen Mexican chocolate cupcakes, appreciating her warped sense of humor. It was her shortest “essay” yet. Clint Lawhead, the magazine’s owner and publisher, would just laugh, congratulate her for making people think and tease her that it would have saved him a bundle if he’d negotiated paying