Maggie Dove Read Online Free Page B

said.
    “It could be a hundred years ago. You don’t recover from something like that.”
    “You’re not the only person in this world who’s suffered,” Winifred said. “Look at me. Here I am, in a nursing home, can’t even move. I’ve suffered too.”
    “I appreciate that, Winifred.”
    “Come right down to it. I’ve suffered more than you. You’ve got your own house and car. You can go out at night. Frankly, I might just as well have lost my daughter because she’s not talking to me. It’s just like she’s dead.”
    “No, I’m sorry, but it’s not the same thing. You and your daughter had an argument and if you would simply call Amy and apologize for being a horse’s ass, she’d forgive you. She’s alive. My daughter’s dead,” Maggie cried out. “There’s not a thing in the world I can do to bring her back.”
    “Well, you have happy memories,” Winifred continued, unabashed.
    “God damn it,” Maggie swore, and slammed down the phone. Why did Winifred always have to make the conversation about herself?
    Her anger seemed to spatter across her genteel living room, pulsating the way the ambulance light had moments ago. Maggie was so angry she couldn’t move; she felt as though something large had settled itself against her chest. She staggered to her feet, swaying under emotion, thinking she would go upstairs, go to sleep, but then she heard someone saying her name.
    The windows were open. She’d just yelled in front of half her community. She, who had struggled so hard to maintain a brave face all these years, had just let down her guard and yelled about her grief, and worst of all, the widow was on her lawn. Maggie could hear Noelle saying her name.
    She remembered then something her mother used to say:
Listeners never hear good of themselves.
    But it was too late.

Chapter 5
    “Maggie Dove?” the voice said. A woman’s voice. Soft, cultured in the way movie stars from the ’50s sounded. Fake. “That short old lady? The mean one who was always yelling at Bender?
    “She’s the one who found my husband?” the disembodied voice went on. “I bet she didn’t shed any tears over my Bender. No matter what Bender did, she was on him.” Maggie felt herself shrink. No matter what her grievances with Bender were, they felt so insubstantial interpreted through this woman’s eyes. Maggie might have writer’s block, but she was still enough of a writer to be able to go into someone else’s head; to see herself as Noelle must.
    “That old lady hated my husband. She must have spent half her time looking out the window to see what my Bender was doing.”
    I’m not that old,
Maggie muttered.
Not yet.
    She wanted to go outside and defend herself, but the conversation had gone on too long to interrupt. Then it would look like she’d been sitting in her house eavesdropping, which she had been. Maggie groaned and sank into her couch, prayed they would all just leave. Now. But they didn’t. The night wasn’t going to end.
    “Didn’t your husband try to kill her tree?” Peter asked. Loyal Peter.
    “Thank you for him,” Maggie whispered.
    “It was just an oak tree,” the widow responded. “Not even a healthy one. There was a brown patch in the middle. And my husband offered to move it.”
    My God, they were an annoying family, Maggie thought. The whole lot of them. The husband was a psychopath, the widow deluded. The younger daughter poorly behaved and the older one swiped Snickers bars on Halloween. Maggie hadn’t complained, but she saw that girl come running up her front stoop and pour a whole bowl full of candies into her bag. They took her snow shovel too. During the last big storm she’d left it out on her front stoop and when Maggie went outside to shovel some more, it was gone. They’d taken it. “Can I have it back?” she’d asked the young one, who was standing on her driveway, holding it.
    “Sure,” she said. Sure.
    “My husband offered to pay her, to get her a new one,