The Funeral Dress Read Online Free Page B

cold front swept fast from the west. Leona planted her feet square beneath her shoulders and surrendered to the subtle pitch and sway of her home. Somesaid the wind blew backward on Old Lick, but Leona knew that wasn’t so. There was nothing peculiar or magical about the living there.
    She closed her eyes and reached for a crib once shoved tight below the window, where a wooden table stood laden with fabrics of different textures and colors, including the pieces of three damask slipcovers needing to be finished by morning. She smiled as her hand fell through the air grasping nothing but memories. She pictured her body, full and round, squeezing past the baby’s bed standing ready to cradle her newborn. She scooted on toward a young Curtis with his tanned face and broad shoulders. He pulled her into his arms and rubbed his calloused hand across her belly.
    The narrow trailer had never allowed for any missteps. Yet it felt so much bigger then—back when Curtis worked in the coal mines and brought home a steady paycheck and she lounged on the sofa for hours in the evenings, resting up for the birth of their first child. She hand stitched nearly a dozen day gowns, cut from Curtis’s old shirts, and embroidered little bunnies along the hems. But even Leona’s most treasured memories had grown fragile, and so she stood a moment longer, straining to hear the sound of a baby cooing and crying in the trailer. In her mind, there was no prettier melody than that.
    Leona reached for the lamp on her sewing table. The room, which she usually kept tidy, was strewn with unfolded laundry in need of mending, glasses half-filled with day-old soda, and two stacks of outdated copies of the TV Guide Leona had intended to burn days ago. Thin green carpeting worn bare in places, fake wood panelingbowed from the walls, and deep cracks spidering across the ceiling looked even worse in the warm lamplight. But Leona had accepted the trailer’s tired condition long ago. She ran her fingers through her wiry gray curls, desperate to cast off the remnants of another exhausting day.
    The windows rattled as the wind seeped past their metal frames, and Leona tugged harder on her sweater. She had fought a chill most of the afternoon, but there was no time to take sick. Too much needlework had left her hands stiff, and a fresh blister was brewing on the tip of her index finger. She grimaced as she twisted and pushed the sweater’s buttons into place. She held the sore to her lips. She knew better than to keep touching it, that it would never heal if she did.
    “Damn,” Leona said as she tripped on the table’s thick square leg. She dropped her navy purse and the paper bag on the floor, then slipped her foot from her canvas loafer and bent to massage her toe. She stared at the pieces of damask stacked high on her sewing table. Her finger throbbed harder.
    Leona reached for a large piece of fabric and held it out in front of her. She examined the seam along the zipper’s edge and picked at a loose thread with her fingernail. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied Curtis still struggling to quiet the truck. She shook her head and picked at another thread. Curtis had always called Leona a miracle worker. He said the way she handled fabric was like watching the Lord turn water into wine. He believed her sewing was a gift, a gift from God. But Leona never came to think of it that way.
    She had planned to finish these slipcovers for a largesofa and two club chairs by early evening. Mrs. Brooks had come from Chattanooga and was adamant that all three pieces be ironed and folded and sitting in a cardboard box outside the trailer door early the next morning. Leona should have finished them yesterday, but the fabric was thick and difficult to manage.
    Her old machine struggled to keep pace as she pushed her foot harder and harder against the floor pedal. She had been forced to do much of the work by hand, and she had been preoccupied all week cleaning and