One Heart Read Online Free Page A

soul already. I mean tell me about him. Tell me how he is.”
    â€œHe’s a good father, and a good man.”
    â€œWhat’s he say after he’s through with you?” I asked her one night. I wanted her to say just one funny thing, like old times.
    â€œNot a word,” she said. “No need for those kind of words between myself and James Gehrig Pittman.” Sometimes she’d just come right on out with his full name like that. I’d be rolling my eyes so far up in my head they might’ve got lost.
    â€œOh,” I’d say.
    â€œSomeday you’ll find it,” she told me. She was eighteen now. She was going to marry him. She sat up on her bed by the window in a pale green negligee she got from our blind neighbor down the road for weeding. Her voice had a new sort of gentleness, like everything in the world was something she loved because the love she had for Jimmy just spilled right over. Her hair was long, and still dyed red, and when I think back to her face, which was filled with the prettiest, what was it, sureness, certainty , the kind that belongs to innocence , it can startle me to think we were ever that young. She was so changed. She’d say things like, Isn’t it amazing we’re alive, Ivy? Look at that willow! Isn’t a goat the most incredible thing? I mean when you really consider it, really see it? Not to mention the stars! The Milky Way!
    I was lonely then, and sure I liked the goats and the Milky Way, but I knew I was missing something, and Gladys for the first time felt almost like a stranger. I’d still lie awake at night and so would she, but between our beds it was like a dark river, her on one side with love, me on the other without.
    Gladys never would look at old pictures. I suppose she couldn’t bear it. And she thinks they’ve been trashed. She’s unaware I rescued them all the day she threw them out so many years ago. I don’t look either. Because I’m not one for looking, at least usually. It’s a waste of time is what I always said. But sometimes now at night, now that Gladys is gone off with Raelene, which is a whole other story I got to tell you, I lay awake thinking I’m going to get up and get the pictures out and sit at the table with a glass of milk and look at us all back then. But I never do get up. I let myself drift off to sleep. I got work to do early in the morning, and Gladys isn’t here helping me anymore, so there aren’t many laughs in the kitchen. Not to say that Gladys was a laugh factory, but we had our times.
    If I brought the pictures out I would look for the one of Gladys, James, Wendell, and myself, sitting on the steps of our house that summer they got married, a black and white my mother took. I can see the way my mother looked taking it just as good as I can see the four of us in the picture. I can see her cheap blue sneakers in the wet grass and her flowered, old, ugly dress with the hem line too long and her skin on her thin legs so white they just glowed like marble in the dusk. Wendell’s already calling Gladys “Mama.” Jimmy’s black Ford is not in the picture, but I would feel it on the border just the same. That picture was taken the night Gladys left the house for good. I cried for days. Maybe I’d take that one out and hang it up. Maybe because that was the first time Gladys left, and this is the second, only this time I think it’s really for good.
    Raelene kept writing to Gladys for four or five years, and I don’t know for sure how many times Gladys wrote back. Raelene was a little girl who needed a mother substitute, I guess, and she thought she had one in Gladys, a kind of pen pal–mother. But she finally stopped writing. I forgot all about her, to tell you the truth.
    Then last spring, late April, when some of the early-bird counselors were up here for special training, this knock comes to the screen door one afternoon. One of the