Ragged Rainbows. Linda Miller Lael

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СКАЧАТЬ nodded and Shay backed up with a flourish, feeling oddly relieved and even a bit dashing. Oh, for an Isadora Duncan–style scarf to flow dramatically behind her as she swept away! She was her mother’s daughter after all.

      She waved at Mitch Prescott and started into the light evening traffic just as the muffler fell off her car, clattering on the asphalt.

      Mitch was there instantly, doing his best not to grin. Shay went from wanting to impress him to wanting to slap him across the face. The roar of the engine was deafening; she backed into the parking lot and turned off the ignition.

      Without a word, Mitch opened the door and when Shay got out, he took her arm and escorted her toward a shiny foreign status symbol with a sliding sunroof and spoked wheels. The muffler wouldn’t dare fall off this car.

      “Where do you live?” Mitch asked reasonably.

      Shay muttered directions, unable to look at him. Damn. First he’d seen her old car virtually fall apart before his eyes and now he was going to see her rented house with its sagging stoop and peeling paint. The grass out front needed cutting and the mailbox leaned to one side and the picture windows, out of keeping with the pre–World War II design, gave the place a look of wide-eyed surprise.

      By the time Mitch’s sleek car came to a stop in front of Shay’s house, it was dark enough to cover major flaws. The screen door flew open and Hank burst into the glow of the porchlight, his teenage babysitter, Sally, behind him.

      “Mom!” he whooped, bounding down the front walk on bare feet. “Wow! That’s some awesome car!”

      Shay was smiling again; her son had a way of putting things into perspective. Sagging stoop be damned. She was rich because she had Hank.

      She turned to Mitch, opening her own door as she did so, and put down a foolish urge to invite him inside. “Good night, Mr. Prescott, and thank you.”

      He inclined his head slightly in answer and Shay felt an incomprehensible yearning to be kissed. She got out of the car and cut Hank off at the gate.

      “Who was that?” the little boy wanted to know.

      Shay ruffled his red-brown hair with one hand and ushered him back down the walk. “The man who bought Rosamond’s house.”

      “Uncle Garrett called,” Hank announced when they were inside.

      Shay paid the babysitter, kicked off her high-heeled sandals and sank onto her scratchy garage-sale couch. Garrett Thompson had been her stepbrother, during Rosamond’s Nashville phase, and though Shay rarely saw him, their relationship was a close one.

      Hank was dancing from one foot to the other, obviously ready to burst. “Uncle Garrett called!” he repeated.

      “Did he want me to call him back?” Shay asked, resting her feet on the coffee table with a sigh of relief.

      Hank shook his head. “He’s coming here. He bought a house you can drive and he’s going fishing and he wants me to go, too!”

      Shay frowned. “A house—oh. You mean a motor home.”

      “Yeah. Can I go with him, Mom? Please?”

      “That depends, tiger. Maggie and the kids will be going, too, I suppose?”

      Hank nodded and Shay felt a pang at his eagerness, even though she understood. He was a little boy, after all, and he needed masculine companionship. He adored Garrett and the feeling appeared to be mutual. “We’d be gone a whole month.”

      Shay closed her eyes. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow, Hank,” she said. “I’ve had a long day and I’m too tired to make any decisions.”

      Anxious to stay in his mother’s good graces, Hank got ready for bed without being told. Shay went into his room and gave his freckled forehead a kiss. When he protested, she tickled him into a spate of sleepy giggles.

      “I love you,” she said moments later, from his doorway.

      “Ah, Mom,” he complained.

      Smiling, Shay closed the door and went into her own room for baby-doll pajamas and a robe. After taking a quick bath and brushing her teeth, she was ready for bed.

      She was not, however, ready for the heated fantasies that awaited her there, in that empty expanse of smooth sheets. She fell asleep imagining the weight of Mitch Prescott’s body resting upon her own.

      The next day was calm compared to the one before it. Shay’s car had been brought to Reese Motors and repaired and she left work early in order to spend an hour with her mother before going home.

      Rosamond sat near a broad window overlooking much of Skyler Beach, her thin, graceful hands folded in her lap, her long hair a stream of glistening, gray-marbled ebony tumbling down her back. On her lap she held the large rag doll Shay had bought for her six months before, when Rosamond had taken to wandering the halls of the convalescent home, day and night, sobbing that she’d lost her baby—couldn’t someone please help her find her baby?

      She had seemed content with the doll and even now she would clutch it close if anyone so much as glanced at it with interest, but Rosamond no longer cried or questioned or walked the halls. She was trapped inside herself forever, and there was no knowing whether or not she understood anything that happened around her.

      On the off chance that some part of Rosamond was still aware, Shay visited often and talked to her mother as though nothing had changed between them. She told funny stories about Marvin and his crazy commercials and about the salesmen and about Hank.

      Today there were no stories Shay wanted to tell, and she couldn’t bring herself to mention that the beautiful house beside the sea, with its playhouse and its gazebo and its gardens of pastel rhododendrons, had been sold.

      She stepped over the threshold of her mother’s pleasant room and let the door whisk shut behind her, blessing Garrett’s father, Riley Thompson, for being willing to pay Seaview’s hefty rates. It was generous of him, considering that he and Rosamond had been divorced for some fifteen years.

      “Hello, Mother,” she said quietly.

      Rosamond looked up with a familiar expression of bafflement in her wide eyes and held the doll close. She began to rock in her small cushioned chair.

      Shay crossed the room and sank into another chair, facing Rosamond’s. There was no resemblance between the two women; Rosamond’s hair was raven-black, though streaked with gray now, and her eyes were violet, while Shay’s were hazel and her hair was merely brown. As a child Shay had longed to be transformed into a mirror image of her mother.

      “Mother?” she prompted, hating the silence.

      Rosamond hugged the doll and rocked faster.

      Shay worked up a shaky smile and her voice had a falsely bright note when she spoke again. “It’s almost dinnertime. Are you getting hungry?”

      There was no answer, of course. There never was. Shay talked until she could bear the sound of her own voice no longer and then kissed her mother’s papery forehead and left.

      The box, sitting in the middle of СКАЧАТЬ