Read Online A Thread of Truth by Marie Bostwick - Free Book Online

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    â€œTake today; when my car wouldn’t start I had to jog a mile to catch a bus and ended up late for work. Evelyn’s a good boss—she understands that things happen—but someone else’s employer might not. Being late to work even once might cost a woman her job. After housing, transportation is the biggest problem most of us face. We simply can’t afford to buy reliable cars, not to mention the gas, insurance, and maintenance to keep them running. If we could live closer in and on the bus line, I’d get rid of my car tomorrow! Everything in New Bern is so close that I could walk to most of the stores. If I didn’t have the expense of owning a car, it would make it much easier to save money.”
    Abigail nodded firmly as she made a hard right into the parking lot of the Stanton Center. “You’re right. Absolutely right. But that’s the problem. New Bern is an old New England town and all the in town lots of any size were built on decades ago. The only available building lots around here are either too small for our purposes, or even farther off the beaten path than what we have now. I’ve racked my brain, but I can’t see a solution to this. Not a good one, anyway.”
    She spied an empty parking spot between two cars, wedged her sedan between them at an alarming speed, and set her parking brake, stomping on the pedal as if it were some sort of poisonous insect. “I’m simply out of ideas.”
    â€œIt’s too bad some of those big mansions in New Bern, you know, those giant places over on Proctor, aren’t for sale,” I said jokingly. “A couple of weeks ago, we went for a walk down that street. Those houses sure are something. One of those places would be big enough to hold ten families.”
    I smiled, remembering the day. The calendar had only just turned to spring. Crocuses were blooming in the flower beds that had been covered with snow only a few days before. At one house, the crocuses were sprouting at odd spots all through the lawn, as if they’d just sprung up on their own, like wildflowers in a field, though I doubted that was the case. I couldn’t see people in this neighborhood just letting any old flower pop up in their lawn. Probably someone had planted them there to give the impression of wildness, but that was all right. They were pretty, no matter how they’d gotten there.
    The sun was warm. Bobby kept pulling off his hat, a knitted stocking cap with two brown and white ovals that made him look like a teddy bear. He looked so cute, but I knew that by this time next year, he’d balk at being seen wearing a teddy-bear hat, just like he was beginning to balk at riding in the stroller. When I was little, my dad used to joke that he was going to put me in a pickle barrel to keep me from getting any bigger. Now I understood what he was talking about. My baby was almost a little boy and my little girl halfway to grown. Make that three quarters.
    She’d insisted on being the one to push Bobby’s stroller, walking behind it like a miniature mother as we ooohed and ahhhed over the enormous mansions and talked about which houses we’d like to live in if we were ever rich.
    My favorite was a sprawling white colonial with black shutters and six dormers tucked into the roofline. The main part of the house was huge to begin with, but it was clear that, over the years, people had added on to the original structure, tacking on a solarium here or a library there as their needs and taste in architecture had changed. It wasn’t necessarily the prettiest house on the street, but something about the evolution of this home appealed to me, maybe because I liked to see how each generation built upon the foundation of the one that came before. The roofline was slightly bowed, and yet it looked like it had always been there and always would be.
    â€œYou’d never run out of guest rooms in a house like