Rosie Read Online Free Page B

top of the cover, made a whining moan, and rubbed her eyes. Teary, sleepy, and mad, she got brusquely out of bed, stomped out to the hallway, clomped down the hall to the bathroom, and slammed the door.
    Elizabeth followed after her but stopped outside the closed door.
    â€œWhat’s with the angry clubfoot routine?”
    â€œChh.”
    â€œAre you mad at me?”
    â€œNo. Derrr.”
    Elizabeth heard water running. “I’ll go make you some breakfast, okay? Come on down when you finish shaving.”
    â€œTss.”
    â€œDon’t be nervous, Rosie. You’ll love first grade.”
    â€œI know I will. Just leave me alone.”
    Rosie threw a small, troubled fit at breakfast because the fried eggs were all snotty, another fit when she saw that her mother had cut the tuna sandwich in her Wonder Woman lunch box the wrong way, another when her mother tried to run a brush through her thick, soft, shoulder-length black curls, and yet another when the toothpaste squirted all over the sink. Butwhen the yellow school bus pulled up across the street, she rushed downstairs ecstatic, blue eyes shining, cheeks flushed. She grabbed her lunch box, kissed her mother, and ran for the bus.
    Elizabeth read the paper and drank coffee in the kitchen, wishing the morning had already passed. After cleaning up the dishes, vacuuming the downstairs, and reading the paper again, she made herself some breakfast—Irish oatmeal, with raisins and brown sugar—and read the want ads. In three pages of Help Wanted listings, one job caught her eye: a cook, with baking experience, was needed at San Quentin. She smiled; she would probably meet more interesting men there than the ones she knew. She closed the paper, sat staring at the kitchen wall for a long time.
    Her life—or her days, at any rate—was a drought, too much time on her hands,. nothing that had to be done. She started to think about lunch. It was ten o’clock. Rosie kept flashing through her mind: Rosie in school, in class, on the blacktop, four-square, the rings, hopscotch; Rosie, the angry clubfoot, stomping down the stairs; Rosie sprawled in unlikely positions on furniture and floors throughout the house, reading, with a baby finger hooked absently over her bottom lip, completely absorbed. Elizabeth sighed deeply at the kitchen table, sighed again a moment later under the strain of boredom. She drummed her long fingers against the table, hit it lightly with a fist, got up and went to the study.
    She sat down in front of the typewriter. Maybe she had it in her to write. One way to find out. She inserted a piece of paper, drummed all eight fingers against the keys, scratched her tilted head, rubbed her eyes, sighed, stared at the paper, was distracted by the plastic Disneyland paperweight out of which Rosie had sucked the water and the apparently nontoxic snow particles so that Tinker Bell lay on the floor, face down on top of her wand ... concentrate. Okay. Here we go. Fingers on the keys, she rocked slightly with a look that said that once she got the first word down on paper she wouldn’t be able to keep pace with herthoughts. “Once” she wrote—no, wait. She xxed it out. “Many years ago”—no wait. “I rememb”—no, xxxxxxx. Poised again, hands on the keys, she stared at Tinker Bell for a long time, hardly blinking—leaped up, walked quickly to the mirror in the hall, and checked herself out. Great straight nose, the long full lips Rosie had inherited, hazel eyes flecked with gold, thick black lashes: handsome, interesting, not pretty, goddamn it, not pretty. But regal. She imagined Johnny Carson asking her what had gotten her going as a writer in her mid-thirties.
    Well, Johnny, when my daughter, Rosie, started first grade, I thought I’d give myself some time to see if I had the talent and drive to write; I’d always thought I’d be good at it, but of course the success of the book