Morning Glory Read Online Free Page A

bread.
    Will’s eyes found it, cooling on the kitchen cupboard beneath a dishtowel. He had to force his attention back to Eleanor Dinsmore when she put the baby in a high chair and offered, “How about a cup of coffee?”
    He nodded silently, venturing no further than the rag rug at the kitchen door. His eyes followed as she fetched two cracked cups and filled them from a white enamel pot on theiron cookstove while the blond child hid in her skirts, hindering her footsteps.
    “Leave off now, Donald Wade, so I can get Mr. Parker his coffee.” The child clung, sucking his thumb until at last she reached down to pick him up. “This here is Donald Wade,” she said. “He’s kind of shy. Hasn’t seen many strangers in his life.”
    Will remained by the door. “Howdy, Donald Wade,” he said, nodding. Donald Wade buried his face in his mother’s neck while she sat down on a scarred wooden chair at a table covered with red flowered oilcloth.
    “You gonna stand by that door all night?” she inquired.
    “No, ma’am.” He approached the table cautiously, pulled out a chair and sat well away from Eleanor Dinsmore, his hat again pulled low over his eyes. She waited, but he only took a pull on his hot coffee, saying nothing, eyes flickering occasionally to her and the boy and something behind her.
    “I guess you’re wondering about me,” she said at last. She smoothed the back of Donald Wade’s shirt with a palm, waiting for questions that didn’t come. The room carried only the sound of the baby slapping his hand on the wooden tray of the high chair. She rose and fetched a dry biscuit and laid it on the tray. The baby gurgled, took it in a fat fist and began gumming it. She stood behind him and regarded Will while repeatedly brushing the child’s feathery hair back from his forehead. She wished Will would look at her, would take that hat off so they could get started. Donald Wade had followed her, was again clinging to her skirts. Still feathering the baby’s hair, she found Donald Wade’s head with her free hand. Standing so, she said what needed saying.
    “The baby’s name is Thomas. He’s near a year and a half old. Donald Wade here, he’s going on four. This one’s going to be bora just shy of Christmas, close as I can reckon. Their daddy’s name was Glendon.”
    Will Parker’s eyes were drawn to her stomach as she rested a hand on it. He thought about how maybe there was more than one kind of prison.
    “Where’s their daddy?” he inquired, lifting his eyes to her face.
    She nodded westward. “Out in the orchard. I buried him out there.”
    “I thought—” But he stopped.
    “You got a strange way of not sayin’ things, Mr. Parker. How’s a body supposed to make up a mind when you keep closed up so?” Will studied her, finding it hard to let loose after five years, and especially when she stood with her children at guard. “Go on, then, say it,” Eleanor Dinsmore prodded.
    “I thought maybe your man run off. So many of ‘em are doin’ that since the depression.”
    “I wouldn’t be lookin’ for no husband then, would I?”
    His glance dropped guiltily to his coffee cup. “I reckon not.”
    “And anyway, Glendon woulda never dreamed of runnin’ off. He didn’t have to. He was so full of dreams he wasn’t here anyways. Always miles away dreamin’ about this and that. The two of us together, we had lots of dreams once.” The way she looked at him, Will knew she harbored dreams no longer.
    “How long’s he been dead?”
    “Oh, don’t you worry none, the baby is his.”
    Will colored. “I didn’t mean that.”
    “Course you did. I watched your eyes when you first come up here. He’s been dead since April. It was his dreams killed him. This time it was the bees and his honey. He thought he’d get rich real fast making honey out in the orchard, but the bees they started swarmin’ and he was in too much of a hurry to use good sense. I told him to shoot the branch down with a