The Turning Season Read Online Free Page A

and coming to a halt with a noisy jerk. When she climbs out of the SUV, she’s loaded down with burdens—a laptop carrier, a suitcase, and a couple of bags of groceries. She looks like she’s run away from home or has arrived at the kind of summer camp where you need to feed yourself. At any rate, it’s clear she’s poised to stay for a while.
    Alonzo has just let the dogs into their fenced corral, but the minute he locks the gate, he ambles over to greet her. He’s actually smiling; if he was capable of it, he’d be beaming. But his voice is reserved, even a little cool, when he says, “Hey, Celeste.”
    â€œZo! My man!” she exclaims, slinging her laptop bag farther back over her shoulder so she can free one arm to hug him. “So you drew the short straw, huh? You were the one who had to come babysit Karadel and all her critters.”
    â€œI don’t mind. I like it here.”
    She looks around comprehensively, taking in the buildings (some of them a little weatherworn, I admit), the tangled acreage (prairie grass and a few scrubby trees), and the general air of isolation and solitude. She doesn’t have to say the words aloud to make it plain this is the last place she’d want to be stuck for any length of time.
    If ever someone was made for a sophisticated urban environment, it’s Celeste. She’s got a thin model’s body, and she wears the most outrageous ensembles with the negligent ease of someone who knows she looks fabulous no matter what she has on. She doesn’t step out of the house without full makeup, brightly polished nails, and the perfect belt for her ensemble.
    Plus, she’s gorgeous. Her astonishingly diverse racial heritage has bequeathed her an exquisite face—high-sloped cheekbones, tilted black eyes, full lips, and a smattering of freckles across her café au lait skin. Her dark hair has a tighter curl than Bonnie’s and she wears it longer, so when it’s not pulled back in a ponytail it makes a Medusa-like swirl of shadow around her face. The physical grace notes were gifts from a broad international ancestry. Although some of her antecedents are a little murky, she knows that she has at least one forebear who was Japanese, one who was Nigerian, one who was Scots-Irish, and one who was Sioux.
    And one who was a shape-shifter. Can’t forget that.
    She’s my best friend, but sometimes when I’m around her I feel gauche and dull and excruciatingly ordinary. My mother used to read me a bedtime story about Country Mouse and City Mouse, and I have long ago repeated it to Celeste. She’s the pampered, pretty city girl; I’m the dogged, homespun country girl. It doesn’t matter that, in the book, Country Mouse learns that there’s no point in envying someone else’s lifestyle. Everyone wants to be City Mouse. Everyone wants to be Celeste.
    She finishes her inspection of the property and heaves an exaggerated sigh. “Well, it could be worse, I suppose,” she says. “It could be
snowing
.”
    Alonzo takes the grocery bags and the suitcase and leads Celeste inside. She thoughtfully holds the door open so I can trot in behind them. The front door leads directly into the kitchen, a big warm room paneled in honey wood and hung with copper pans and dried herbs. Janet was responsible for the original decorating, but I’ve added a few touches of my own. More flowerpots in the windows, filled with cheery blooms. New curtains with motifs of fruit and blossoms. A new set of ceramic dishes in bright reds and deep ochres. In human form, I crave color; even in the animal shapes that don’t register hue, I like to look at the varying shapes and textures. They remind the person inside that she will be back one day to take possession of these objects again.
    â€œI didn’t know what kinds of scraps you’d been subsisting on since you came out here, so I brought a bunch of