One Heart Read Online Free

at war. The girl had left the baby with her mother, then Jimmy came home from the war and grew attached to little Wendell. You could feel how he loved that boy. If the two of them were standing behind you and you didn’t know it, you’d turn around anyhow because you could feel it. The love, I mean.
    Really Jimmy was only twenty-two years old, but when I met him I was sixteen and thought, Now who is this older man Gladys drug home? because in Jimmy’s expression there was age and a kind of wise look. He wasn’t usual. He was a college man thanks to the GI Bill. He was tall with these blue eyes welled up with kindness, a kind of weight that kept him separate, cut off, like you didn’t really know him. He was looking at you kindly but from a distance.
    I believe he was lonely and Gladys always noticed loneliness in people, and felt for it.
    The two of them were so in love it made me nearly sick to be around. Jimmy came out to the farm with Wendell and some Ballantine beer stashed in his old Ford every evening, and half the time they’d leave the child with me, and I’d sit and swing him on the porch swing, and tell him little stories, but my mind was on them, knowing how they’d be drinking and talking deep and using their hands out in the dark field. The swing would squeak and whine, squeak and whine. The one-night stands I’d known did not seem sweet next to the love my sister had with Jimmy. I felt inside like I was empty then, so empty I had to be as fat as I was just to store the emptiness. I would sit and sit and swing Wendell and hum “Ain’t Misbehavin’” like I was cheerful. That has always been my way. Wen smelled like a milk mustache and cut grass. We’d look at the summer moon bright in the sky, we’d hear crickets, and the squeak of the swing chains, we’d smell the dark roses growing up the side of the house, and every three minutes he would say, “Where’s Daddy?” till it drove me crazy and I began saying, “Daddy went up to the moon. See him there?” or “Daddy’s in Paris selling Bibles” or “Daddy’s joined the Chinese Circus.” That just amused old Wendell, he was so smart. He’d joke right back. “He joined the circus?” he’d say, “Is he the man on the flying trapeze?” And you could tell that even though he was only three, he was being sort’ve sarcastic.
    â€œThat’s right, he’s the man on the flying trapeze, Wendell, hope he don’t fall.”
    â€œOh, me too!” smart Wendell would say. He loved me for telling him these little tales, he really did, but I wanted love from someone more my size.
    Gladys weren’t the same after Jimmy. Before Jimmy at night we stayed awake talking in the twin beds, two sisters on nine acres with six cows and two parents. Gladys was not always serious. Not at all. She could talk down-to-earth too, and we would compare the boys we knew (some only in our imaginations), who was the good lover, who was the lover that hurt, who was the lover who couldn’t hurt if he tried. We would tell each other what the boys said in passion and how their voices changed after passion, how they didn’t want a thing to do with us then, their fine bodies all rigid and twiny and their eyes off to the new horizon, and how we were glad because they were all a bunch of wood-tick hicks from Dover. (Take the D out of Dover and it’s over. ) They were so dumb when they went to the movie theater and saw the sign saying SEVENTEEN AND OVER PERMITTED they went home and rounded up seventeen friends. That kind of thing is what we’d say in the dark when we were two foolish girls before Jimmy came on the scene.
    â€œTell me about Jimmy,” I’d say on those summer nights after Jim and Wen drove off in their Ford.
    â€œHe’s a good soul,” she’d say. Like she was an old, tender woman.
    â€œYou told me about his