Read Online Cool Water by Dianne Warren - Free Book Online

stands and feels the floor beneath her bare feet.
    â€œBlaine,” she says.
    He groans in his sleep and rolls over, away from her.
    She can still hear the plane. The sound is real, she’s sure of it. She grabs a pair of jeans off the floor and pulls them on under her nightie, but then the sound of the plane stops. No crash. She listens. Nothing. A dream. So she wasn’t awake. She just thought she was awake.
    She gets back into bed, still in her jeans, and pulls the sheet up even though she doesn’t need it. She rolls against Blaine’s warm back, but he mumbles “too hot” and pushes her away. She rolls to her own side of the bed and drops off to sleep.
    No falling planes in her dreams this time. Just one endless, obsessive dream about shelling bright green peas and sweating in the hot, hot sun.
    Home Invasion
    There’s barely a breeze but it doesn’t take much to get a creak out of the ancient, probably half-dead, and therefore unstable, evergreen tree outside of Norval and Lila Birch’s bedroom window in Juliet. As Norval half listens to his wife recite what she expects him to do the next day, he resolves, once again, to cut the tree down before it falls through the roof of their split-level house and lands right on top of them. Thinking about the tree leads him to think about his lawn, and then the hardware store and the new lawn mower he’s been eyeing. It’s not a riding mower, but it is a shiny green electric with many special features. Norval gets great pleasure from the act of mowing grass, which he’s been unable to do since his old gas mower died on him a few weeks ago. It bothers him when he gets home from work and sees that his grass is too long, but he just hasn’t had the time to stop at the hardware store. You’d think the overgrown lawn would bother his house-proud wife too, but it doesn’t seem to.
    From two blocks away, he hears Mrs. Baxter’s rooster. The rooster has a defective cock-a-doodle-doo that makes him more irritating than a fully functioning rooster would be. He’s not even useful as an alarm clock because he has no sense of night and day. His feeble half-crow reminds Norval of the imperfections in everything.
    â€œI’d like to kill that rooster,” he says. “A rooster that doesn’t know the difference between night and day deserves to die.”
    His wife says, “You’re not listening to me, Norval,” and he turns his attention back to the list. All of the items on it have something to do with renovations to the church, which Lila sees as necessary for the wedding she is planning for their only daughter, Rachelle. Lila seems to have forgotten altogether their daughter’s age (eighteen), along with the fact that she’s just graduated from high school and has no plans to get an education that will be of use in earning her a decent living, and since she’s marrying Kyle Hoffert, she really ought to have a backup plan. The Hofferts earned their living until recently off their contract to collect pregnant mares’ urine for the hormone-replacement industry. Those contracts were cancelled when science decided the practice of replacing women’s hormones was not such a good idea after all, and the farms quickly became a thing of the past. The Hofferts run a few hundred head of cattle and are trying to maintain their horse-breeding program, but the mares’ urine had been a lot more valuable than either the cattle or the horses are now.
    And in addition to the worry about Rachelle’s financial security, there’s the notable fact that the bride is pregnant. Lila has decided to ignore this detail until after the wedding, at which time she’ll make an announcement as though it’s news, when everyone in Juliet already knows, and if they don’t they will when they see Rachelle in her wedding dress.
    â€œCan’t you take care of some of these things?” Norval