The Language of Secrets Read Online Free Page B

The Language of Secrets
Book: The Language of Secrets Read Online Free
Author: Dianne Dixon
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dressed as a witch—a reminder that Halloween was tomorrow, and that Barton was leaving for New York on November 1. Caroline’s impulse was to go inside and call him, to say one final good-bye. But just then, Lissa and Julie burst out of the house, bristling with indignation.
    Julie was trying to wrestle a tiny Smurf doll away from Lissa. “Mommy,” she was saying. “We were going to play Smurfs and I choosed Smurfette first! Tell Lissa I get to be Smurfette.”
    Lissa threw herself at Caroline’s legs, clinging tight and insisting: “No. It’s my turn!”
    Caroline gathered her up and did a little waltz around the porch, tickling her cheeks with butterfly kisses. “I have a good idea … There are
dozens
of Smurfs. Why don’t you both be a Smurfette?”
    Julie shook her head and sighed, clearly exasperated by Caroline’s ignorance. “Mommy, that won’t work.”
    Lissa leaned close, her breath damp and warm on Caroline’s cheek. “In the Smurfs there’s only one girl.” She whispered this, as if trying to shield Caroline from embarrassment. Then her chin began to quiver and her eyes filled with tears. “And that’s no fair,” she said.
    Caroline breathed in her child’s sweet scent—baby shampoo and crayons and vanilla. “No, honey. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all.”
    As she said this, Caroline wondered how it was that young children, unconscious of the workings of politics or theology, had such clear awareness of the concept of fairness. It was a sensitivityso keen, it reduced them to tears when they discovered that absolute justice was unavailable. Caroline wondered if, in the mysterious place from which children had so recently come, there was a realm where the human spirit existed in a perfect balance between right and wrong. “What a sweet thing it must be,” Caroline murmured into Lissa’s ear, “that place of complete fairness.”
    Lissa laid her head on Caroline’s shoulder and sighed softly, as if in benediction, or resignation.
    Caroline remembered how strongly she had once felt about the issue of fairness. She had begun crying out for it when she’d been about the same age as Lissa and Julie were now. But when little Caroline would weep that something was “no fair,” her mother would simply shrug and say: “You want fair? Go to Pomona.”
    And the idea of Pomona had become a talisman for Caroline. For years she had imagined it as an Eden, a place of perfect justice. But the summer she was eleven, she and her mother took a road trip and Caroline discovered the truth. Pomona was nothing more than the site of the Los Angeles County Fair. Her imagined paradise had turned out to be a low-slung, gritty place, more desert than garden, more blight than beauty. Caroline had looked up at her thin, dry, tightly wound mother and had hated her. Her mother had taken away the purity of Pomona and left in its place a brawling carnival soaked in spilled beer and the piss of prizewinning pigs.
    “You know what, girls?” Caroline said. “Mommy can’t fix it that there’s only one Smurfette in the whole world. But Mommy can fix s’mores. Lots and lots of s’mores. Hundreds and millions and gazillions of s’mores!”
    During the next hour, her children’s delighted laughter was all Caroline heard. Then the phone rang.
    For a moment, she wasn’t certain that anyone was at the otherend of the line; there was only the indistinct background noise of a restaurant, or perhaps a cocktail lounge. She was about to hang up, when she heard his voice.
    “Ah. Sweet Caroline” was all he said. And she instantly knew who it was. She had never forgotten the sound of him: rolling velvet, edged with filaments of diamond dust. Seduction traveling with the promise of things both beautiful and cutting.
    “Mitch.” Simply saying his name created an electricity in Caroline, a sensation that felt like fireworks and brandy.
    Caroline didn’t notice that Julie was trying to boost Lissa high enough to reach

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