The Best of Kristina Wright Read Online Free Page B

had been in her family for four generations and she knew them like the back of her hand, even in the dark.
    She coasted the truck to a stop as she came to the end of the dirt road, where cornfield gave way to empty prairie. In the dark, beneath a blue moon, all she had to remind her of the flowers was their scent – wildflowers, their brilliant hues blanketing the grasslands like the Seurat painting “Forest in Barbizon” she had seen years ago at a traveling exhibit in Iowa City.
    She killed the engine and the old diesel engine wheezed to a halt. She reached for the cardboard box in the passenger seat and cradled it in her lap.
    “If I don’t do this now, I’m not going to do it,” she said aloud.
    She climbed from the vehicle, holding the box carefully, and slammed the truck door. The sound reverberated across the vast openness, startling a pair of whip-poor-wills. Their flight reminded her of bats and she shuddered. She was thankful for the rows of corn at her back, as if they could protect her from whatever danger lurked in the darkness.
    Careful of loose rocks and rabbit holes – the last thing she needed was a broken hip way out here where no one would find her for a day or two – she picked her way across the gently sloping ground, knee-deep in flowers. She remembered other walks like this. Only she hadn’t been alone.
    “Guess I’m not alone tonight, either.” Talking to herself was a sign of dementia, wasn’t it? She didn’t much care. A light breeze sent tendrils of her long silver hair across her face.
    She set the box down on the ground and brushed her hair back, looking around. Now she could pick out individual trees in the distance, the big rock she’d climbed as a child, the stubborn underbush that wouldn’t die back until after the frost.
    “We had some good times here, didn’t we, Ed?”
    Ed, of course, didn’t answer. Ed, what was left of him, was in the cardboard box at her feet. Dead now for over a month, he wasn’t going to agree with her about their good times or argue with her about who should have driven out here in the first place. She was on her own.
    She’d waited a month to bring his ashes here. It had been important to wait that month, to wait for the right day, the right time. To come to the field as summer began.
    “You’re laughing your ass off, aren’t you?” she said, staring up into the night sky.
    The stars were dimmed because of the full moon, but she could still sort out the constellations just like Ed had taught her when they were in high school. Ursa Minor, Centaurus and the Corona Borealis winked and twinkled and she could, for a moment, imagine Ed with her. He would point out some new star or other, weaving a story to make her laugh until she was dizzy from looking up and had to lie down in the prairie grass.
    She took a step forward, forgetting the box at her feet, and nearly tumbled over it. “Serve me right to break a hip out here. Romeo and Juliet all over again.”
    Caroline had taught high school English for thirty-four years. Being here, alone in a field with her husband’s remains, felt like the kind of tragedy Shakespeare would have written.
    Ed was a farmer. He had no use for Shakespeare or Coleridge. He’d liked Poe, though. She’d read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to him after the cancer had begun eating away at his liver. He’d liked Poe. He’d even liked the poetry, though he grumped it was “sissified”. She had read “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee” to him so many times she knew them by heart.
    “That man knows a thing or two about what scares people,” he had mumbled as he drifted off to sleep after one of her Poe readings.
    A tear slid down Caroline’s wrinkled cheek. Ed had never been afraid of anything except dying. He hadn’t even been much afraid of that. It was the pain that scared him, the helplessness.
    He had said, “Don’t bury me, Caro.