Read Online Chesapeake Tide by Jeanette Baker - Free Book Online

won’t.”
    â€œShe won’t be here for long, anyway. No one in her right mind would trade California for Marshyhope Creek.”
    Her grandmother didn’t mention that Verna Lee had done exactly that. She simply nodded. “Libba was a nice little gal, all dark eyes and dark hair and a smile that lit up the world.” She glanced at her granddaughter. “Just like you. Nola Ruth went into a decline when she left with that boy.”
    â€œWhere is that boy?” Verna Lee asked.
    Drusilla shrugged. “Ask her when you see her.”
    â€œI just might do that.”
    â€œNo reason why you shouldn’t. You had the same schoolin’.”
    â€œNo one knows that.”
    â€œThat’s your fault, Verna Lee. You always were a smart one. No one would be surprised to find out you came home with an education.”
    Verna Lee left the room and came back with the coffeepot. She refilled their cups. “Things are fine the way they are, Grammy. I love this shop. It’s a whole lot better than being a wage slave and haggling over hours and raises and pension plans. It suits me. I’ve never deliberately kept the fact that I have a degree from anyone. Because no one expects a black woman from Marshyhope Creek to have a college degree, it just doesn’t come up.”
    The old woman eyed her shrewdly. “If you say so.” Verna Lee smiled over the rim of her coffee cup. “So, do you have any other gossip to tell me?”
    â€œRussell Hennessey’s comin’ home to run his daddy’s fishing fleet.”
    The younger woman’s eyes widened. “Well, well, well,” she said softly. “Libba and Russ home at the same time. It won’t be dull in Marshyhope Creek this summer.”
    Russell Tremayne Hennessey pulled his Ford Explorer over to the side of the road, removed his sunglasses and stared across the gold-tipped waters of the Chesapeake. The sun sat on the bay like melted copper. Trawlers and single-manned boats would all be docked by now, leaving what they hadn’t caught to the brown pelicans and giant blue herons and an occasional migratory loon on its way to the colder, cleaner ponds of Maine. As a child, Russ had dreamed of birds and what it would be like to feel that lifting, soaring, tightening-of-the-stomach sensation at the surge of an updraft, to experience the power of wind beneath spread wings and know that the world was miles below.
    He wondered, not for the first time, how he could have left. Seventeen years ago it seemed reasonable to put the pain and disappointment behind him and move on. But now, in retrospect, he’d been a fool. The pain had abated in its own time, and the memories had followed him on that mad, diabolic flight out of Marshyhope Creek, away from the light-struck, water-bright bays of Maryland, west through the smoky Blue Ridge Mountains and the red-earthed flatlands of Virginia, north across the Mason-Dixon Line into the rolling green farmlands of Pennsylvania, breaching for the first time in his life the boundaries where no self-respecting Southerner would willingly exile himself. How he’d come to believe the flight syndrome was the only way to deal with the downward trajectory of his life was a mystery.
    As close as he could tell, it had all started when Libba Delacourte ran off with a boy too wet behind the ears to know what to do with his hanging body parts. Her defection had shocked Russ. Mitch had told him, albeit reluctantly and by mail and after all other topics had exhausted themselves, that Libba had run off with a Yankee and then, rubbing his nose in it even deeper, married him.
    Russ had gone into such a decline that he no longer attended classes, was put on probation and subsequently kicked out of the Citadel. That led to a stint in the army as a private, a return to Marshyhope Creek, a bad marriage, another flight as far and as fast as his wherewithal would take him, another attempt at