Nancy Culpepper Read Online Free Page B

“I’ll have to check with the airlines.” She suddenly looked down, wondering if she had remembered to dress. Guests were entering the dining room for breakfast.
    She spoke with her father, who sounded weary and distant.
    “Can’t you wait till Monday?” Nancy asked him.
    “Nobody would come on Monday. They’d have to work.”
    “I’ll try to get there,” she said. “I just woke up. I’m looking out at the sea. It’s beautiful. We’re at this nice inn—”
    “I know how much you always cared for Granny, and you had always planned to come back for her funeral,” said Daddy.
    “Yes,” Nancy said.
    Jack was still sleeping. Telephone calls never alarmed him. Nancy instinctively feared bad news from the telephone. She was fourteen, on the farm in Kentucky, when the family first got a telephone, the same year they got television. Jack came from a different world— private school, summer camps. How did we ever get together? Nancy thought wildly, as she woke him up and told him the news.
    “Granny had some kind of fit,” she said. “It sounded unreal.” She remembered the way her grandmother lay curled up, barely able to turn, for so long. Nancy’s father had once said, “Old people get that way, drawed up like a baby in the womb.” They had attempted once to take her to a nursing home, but she had refused to go.
    Jack sat up on his elbows, looking disappointed. Jack, a photographer, had planned to make a wedding album for Laurie and Ed as a present.
    “Do you want me to fly down with you?” he asked.
    “No. It’s not necessary.” Jack was always uncomfortable in the South. The first time he went with her, in the late sixties, a truck driver had threatened to beat him up. It was Jack’s hair. Nancy said now, “You don’t have to go. I don’t want you to miss the wedding, and you were counting on seeing whales tomorrow.”
    “You may not even be able to get there because of the airline strike,” Jack said, getting out of bed and parting the curtains. “Oh, it’s raining,” he said. “I was going to run.”
    “Well, if I can’t get there, then I can’t get there,” said Nancy.
    “How would they feel if you didn’t go?”
    “I don’t know.” She pulled her sweat shirt over her head. Her face was still in her sweat shirt when Jack drew her to him and held her, waiting for her to cry.
    “Would you call the airlines for me while I take a shower?” Nancy asked. “This hasn’t registered yet. Look at me. I’m not even crying.”
    In the shower, Nancy realized that everything in the Blue Lantern Inn was blue. The wallpaper was blue. The rugs were blue. In the lobby downstairs, seashells on blue tiles were mounted on the wall. The inn seemed to be the ideal place she had aspired toward since her childhood, when she read about the pleasant, cozy tearooms in the storybooks. She tried to picture her grandmother’s face—the gentle woman she loved—but all she could see was a silhouette of an old woman hunched over her dishpan set on the gas stove to heat. In the stove, in a compartment next to the oven, would be food from dinner saved for supper. Miraculously, no one in the family had ever had food poisoning. Nancy pushed open the clouded-glass window in the shower and saw the ocean beating, gray in the rain. She dreaded the thought of flying in the rain.
    “The only plane that will get you to Louisville with decent connections leaves Boston in two hours,” Jack told Nancy when she came out of the shower. “And you’ll have to fly standby. There’s one from New York at six, but we’d have to drive to New York, and there’s nothing out of Louisville until noon tomorrow. I don’t think that one would get you home in time for the funeral. Anyway, all the flights are booked solid, and you’d have to take a chance on getting a seat.”
    “Let’s eat and think about this,” said Nancy. She had hoped for an evening flight so she would not have to miss the wedding. It occurred to her