Willow Read Online Free Page B

she nor Daddy had were tiny freckles along the crests of my cheeks. I have a much lighter complexion than either of them as well. None of that was remarkable considering I was adopted, of course, but my adoptive mother was always jealous of my nose, claiming it was perfect and in proportion with my mouth and my eyes, speaking about it as if it were all a waste on me.
When I was a little girl. she warned me about my weight and predicted that I would always be chunky since I didn't have her genes. She pointed out my bloated cheeks and told me that was a good indication of what was to be.
"Your real mother must have been a chunky woman with a double chin," she declared. "Probably with oversized, sagging breasts and a waist you could tie an ocean liner to when it was in port She was probably short and squatty with ballooned cheeks and tiny eyes. Medicine, especially the medicine they give mentally ill people, can do that to a person, you know, and then their offspring inherit it."
She drew so many ugly visions of my real mother for me that I was sure I had been born to some sort of circus freak. I hated thinking about her and secretly harbored the hope that I had been created in a laboratory. Someday my father would reveal it, and it would shut my mother's mouth.
Amou said my adoptive mother was wrong about my baby fat, anyway, and was quick to cheer me up whenever my A.M. said things like that to me.
"Your mama is so worried about being infeliz , unhappy, and the wrinkles that would come, you'd think she would make sure you never be sad." she muttered.
Amou said many things under her breath. things I wasn't supposed to hear, much less understand. Sometimes she would use as many Portuguese words as she could, but I got so I understood those words, even the curse words, because I sat by observing and listening when she and her sister Marisa met for lunch at our house every other Sunday.
Actually, even as a child. I understood a great deal more than anyone thought, especially about myself.
But not quite as much as I needed to
understand. Not vet. That was coming.
It waited for me on a shelf in Daddy's office like a secret whispered in a dead man's ear.
.
When I arrived at the airport in Columbia. I was very surprised to see my cousin Margaret Selby Delray waiting for me at the arrival gate. It had been at least three years since we had seen and spoken to each other, the last time being at Uncle Darwood's funeral, The family had given out the story that he had died of heart failure. His alcoholism was an embarrassment that Aunt Agnes simply would not acknowledge. Like so many friends and relatives of my parents. the Delroys traveled on a bus without windows from one fantasy to another, shifting their eyes quickly away from anyone who would dare actually to look at them when they wove one of their illusions.
Margaret was only six months younger than I was, and comparisons were inevitable. I guess. She was two inches taller, but, contrary to my adoptive mother's predictions, I was the one who lost all her baby fat. The roundness evaporated from my face as if some magical sculptor molded my visage a little every night, bringing my high cheekbones out, thinning my lips, shaping my jaw and the lines of my neck and shoulders, firming and curving my breasts and narrowing my waist, until one day I looked at myself in my ivory oval vanity mirror and felt my heart go skipping with the real possibility that I was going to be attractive after all.
Amou was the only one I dared tell. I did it in the form of a question, of course.
"Do you think I'm getting pretty. Amou?" I asked her one afternoon in the kitchen. I liked helping her prepare dinner.
She stopped what she was doing and looked at me with that soft smile on her lips that I had grown to think of as my true sunlight.
"It's like you've been wearing a child's mask and slowly, slowly, it's disappearing and you be coming out. But don't be staring at yourself all day." she warned. "Worst thing