Read Online A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick - Free Book Online Page A

you want, Son?” Jessie’s mother interrupted. “More potatoes? Rolls? Eat your greens.”
    Roy shook his head. “I-I-I w-w-want…” He swallowed. “I—I—I w-w-want g-g-gold.”
    Jessie’s father tousled his hair. “Don’t we all, Son.”
    Jessie smiled at Roy. She’d love to give him treasures.
    “Jessie will just have to see if she has gold or if she’ll have to lug some rocks before she can fill that bag with what she wants.” Her father smiled at his middle daughter. “I think it’s a fine opportunity.”
    “She won’t be able to contribute,” Lilly complained. “And I’ll bear the results of that, I suppose.”
    “You’re older. You’re working. You can afford it,” Jessie said.
    “Jessie, don’t be sassy,” her mother said.
    “I don’t know why you always take her side,” Lilly said.
    “She didn’t,” Jessie said.
    Jessie’s father frowned. She’d been too quick to snap at Lilly. Why had she been so impulsive when she was so close to achieving what she wanted?
    Forks poked at sausages. The clock ticked.
    “It’s how we spread the load in this family,” her father said at last. “Each does her part, Lilly, as she can. And we help each other. My parents helped me; we can do likewise.” His voice held a wistful tone, and Jessie wondered what dream he might have planted that never came to bloom. “You’re of fine help and support to us, Lilly. And we need that and appreciate it. Very much.”
    “And what part will Jessie be doing? If she’s working all day for nothing, at something she even likes to do, and then doesn’t contribute—”
    “I hope to get an evening cleaning job,” Jessie said. “And I can help Mama more with the laundry. Or I can rake the leaves this fall. So you won’t have to, Lilly. I know the dust bothers your cough.”
    “Well. That would be a start,” her older sister said. The dust from the elm and maple leaves always left Lilly fighting a cold once the cool weather came.
    “And you’ll speak to Mr. Steffes since she was so helpful to him this morning,” her mother told her father. Did her mother give some sort of signal to her father? Jessie couldn’t always tell what their raised eyebrows or the set of their jaws might be saying.
    “I heard about that. And what were you doing there at that hour of the day?”
    “Seeing about…employment,” Jessie said, and hoped the slant of truth would slip the subject on to something else.
    But it didn’t.
    “Employment? Strange to be applying at Steffes’s when you had the interview with the photographer,” her father said.
    Jessie sighed. She may as well tell the whole truth because it always came up to catch her anyway. “I’d rented a bicycle, Papa. So I could ride out past Lake Winona to take a picture of the bluff fires right at dawn. It was going to be so lovely. But then Mr. Steffes fell and I had to get the doctor, and then I got all bloody, and then there was the interview and—”
    “You rented a bicycle?” Lilly slammed her fork down. “Papa, why does she have money for such things as that?”
    “I didn’t actually rent it,” Jessie said. “So I’m sure I can get the money back.”
    “I’m singing on Sunday, aren’t I, Mama?” Selma asked. “Irene and me?”
    “Irene and I,” her mother corrected. “It was announced in the paper already. Yes. Hush now.”
    “Don’t let her change the subject,” Lilly complained. “Jessie’s always getting by with things, and Selma helps her.”
    “I don’t get by with anything,” Jessie said. “I do my part and I’ll do even more in the next six months. I won’t even have the pleasure of using my camera to take my mind off the drudgery.”
    “If I couldn’t sing for six months, I don’t know what I’d do.” Selma sighed. “Life would be just…devastating.” She put the back of her hand against her forehead, reminding Jessie of a woman on a theater advertisement looking dramatic, lying back in some swain’s arms.