Read Online The Smart One by Ellen Meister - Free Book Online

drawer and knew she had to be hiding something in it.”
    “How did you know that?” I asked.
    Joey stood with her hands on her hips, more comfortable in a skimpy bra and panties than most people are fully dressed. “Please,” she said. “Renee hasn’t had her period in years. Why would she still have a tampon box?”
    “Your mind works in mysterious ways,” Clare said.
    “All those years as a druggie,” Joey explained. “I spent a lot of time thinking up hiding places for my stash.” She pulled the box from my hand and opened the lid. “See?” she said, showing us the contents. “Looks like a letter or something.”
    “Put it back,” I said.
    “Nuh-uh,” Joey said. “No way. Not until I’ve read it.”
    “Joey,” I said, trying to grab the box from her.
    She turned her back to me and extracted a thin blue page that looked like it had been folded and refolded many times. “It is a letter!” she exclaimed, staring at it. “Dearest Samuel,” she stopped and looked over her shoulder at Clare and me, her mouth wide open. “A love letter to her husband!”
    “Samuel?” I said. “But Mrs. Waxman always called him Sam or Sammy.”
    “Maybe it’s not from her,” Clare said, moving toward Joey and looking over her shoulder. “Maybe Mr. Waxman had a lover .”
    “C’mon, put it away,” I said. “This is none of our business.”
    “If you don’t want to hear it, go stand in another room,” Clare said. “I have to know what this says.”
    I tsked and crossed my arms. This was wrong, a terrible invasion of privacy. But if Clare and Joey were going to hear the letter, I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it.
    “Get on with it,” I said to Joey.
    She read, “Today I am happy because I know that you love me. If we cannot be together, God has His will and I have grace so accept. Your love is precious gift I will forever keep. In this life, we can only be happy if we open our hearts to know what is a blessing.” Joey looked up at us. “Philosophical,” she commented, nodding in assent, and continued reading. “As maybe you guess, God has given me another gift. Your life grows within me now and that is more glorious even than what we have beetwing us.”
    “Beetwing?” I asked. “She sounds foreign.”
    “She sounds pregnant,” Clare said.
    Joey squealed with glee and went back to reading. “I understand if you want me to go away now. I will never wish to be a burden to you or to your family. But know that I love you,and already I love this child, and will be devoted to you both forever and ever.”
    Joey stopped and looked up at us.
    “Is that it?” Clare asked.
    “That’s it.” She looked down at the page. “It’s not even signed.”
    “Let me see it,” I said, and Joey handed it to me. I looked down at the curly European script and a chill danced up my spine. Could it be Lydia’s handwriting? It looked so very much like the script I saw her write that day at the kitchen table.
    But my brain didn’t want to process what that meant. I was stuck seeing Mr. Waxman the way I did when I was ten. He was an old man, somebody’s dad. He couldn’t have had an affair with Lydia, could he?
    But it made sense. If he got Lydia pregnant, he might have forced her to leave. It would explain why she disappeared so suddenly from Kenny’s life. Sam Waxman might have paid her for her silence.
    “We should show it to Kenny,” Joey said.
    “No!” I said. “Absolutely not.”
    “Why?”
    “First of all, it’s none of our damn business. We shouldn’t even have read it. Second, he doesn’t need more fuel for hating his father.”
    Clare looked over my shoulder at the letter. “I wonder who it’s from.”
    “Maybe somebody who worked in his factory,” I said, feeling only slightly guilty about throwing them off with a red herring. After all, the situation didn’t need more drama, and it was going to be hard enough to keep Joey from telling Kenny. If she knew I suspected the letter was