Read Online Adelaide Piper by Beth Webb Hart - Free Book Online Page A

us with kisses or “I love yous” the way I saw some mamas do. Now, I knew we were her very life, but she showed it to us by what she did for us. Works of service—that was her love language.
    â€œYou have to admit she’s kinda frigid,” Dizzy had said to me one afternoon when Daddy coaxed Mama to an overnight in Myrtle Beach to attend a Bizway meeting. She didn’t want to go, and she was terrified that Papa Great might find out what they were up to. When she was leaving, she couldn’t bring herself to kiss us good-bye, not even Lou, who had been stung by a bee on her top lip that afternoon. “Oh, girls,” she’d said, wringing her tough little hands. “I’ve made you spaghetti and a salad, and you can call Juliabelle if you need anything.”
    â€œLoosen up and have some fun at MB, Mom!” Dizzy said.
    â€œYeah,” I said, putting my arm around Lou. “Take a walk on the beach and pretend you’re on vacation.”
    Mama shook her head in dismay and walked through the door, head down, before muttering, “Bye-bye.”
    Now, I suspected that Mama had a story and a half to tell if she could ever get the words out. She was raised mostly by a nanny named Rosetta in the thick of Charleston high society. Her aristocratic mom was prone to nervous breakdowns, and her daddy, a famous German physician at the medical university, didn’t pay her much mind. Mama hated even going back to the “Holy City” and asked me to take Zane to his doctor’s appointments at the veterans hospital. She said that the Charleston skyline, with all of those steeples stabbing the clouds, just made her stomach turn.
    Mama was also a master escape artist, and she had taught this craft to me, which I honed through my poetry and excessive daydreams. When my allergies flared up during childhood and I scratched the backs of my knees until they bled, Mama calmed my nerves by saying, “Imagine you are somewhere else, sweetheart. An opera singer on a stage, or a mermaid in a deep-sea cave.” And I could do it; I could nearly escape the present and go somewhere else in my mind. What a wonderful trick to be transported like that!
    Once, during my third-grade bedtime routine, I asked her, “What is heaven like?” in expectation of a great imaginative journey. To my surprise, Mama stood gulping back tears and said, “I don’t know. No one ever told me about it.” Then she scurried out of the room, sending Daddy in to kiss me good night.
    Mama was an orphan in a sense, and she did all in her power not to make the same mistake with us. The dedication with which she approached her role as mother ranked head and shoulders above that of the other moms in town. She was always the first in line to pick us up from school. The napkins in our lunch boxes had stickers or smiley faces on them each day, along with a thought: “I am thinking about you!” Or “Smile!” Or “I love you.” (It was much easier to write it.)
    Motherhood was the role she had always wanted. Domesticity was her territory, from the tomato vines to the laundry room, and she claimed it as best she could.
    Maybe that’s why Juliabelle was in my life. She was a widow, and she didn’t have any children or grands of her own, and she never saw me that she didn’t cup my face and tell me that she loved me.
    â€œI’m afraid Adelaide’s right, Zane,” Mama said now while he forcefully turned the air-conditioner knobs and held out his plastic hand over the vents as though the cold, hard machinery of his prosthetic could feel the hot air.
    He pulled reluctantly over on the side of a mountain and puttered into a run-down Exxon station. After a few minutes of conversation with the gas station manager, he bounded back to the car, shaking his head in defeat.
    â€œWell, we went up the parkway in the wrong direction, and we’re in Goodloe,