Read Online Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew - Free Book Online Page A

taken root in Dinah’s mind. So, with the growth of the host, the memory itself became enlarged beyond any action that ever engendered it. Now those memories belonged no more to Polly, their originator, but were the property of Dinah, for whom they were the only definition of her mother.
    Every now and then, Dinah would approach Buddy with these images, these ideas she had about her mother. “Don’t you remember, though, when Mother talked about the time she made herself a strapless dress out of a satin bedspread? Very daring at the time, I guess. Can you imagine her doing that?”
    Buddy would look up from his book or away from the television. “Oh, really?” he would say, raising his eyebrows in good humor. “I don’t remember that, but you’re right. It’s hard to imagine.” Then he would go back to whatever he was doing, not having tried to imagine it at all.
    But it had been Buddy who had phoned her at college when her father had been shot.
    “What do you mean, he was ‘shot’?” Dinah had said, after she understood that he was all right but in the hospital.
    “Oh, Lord, Dinah! It was just some seedy thing in a motel. There was some other couple, too,” Buddy had answered, sounding more put-out than anything else about the whole business.
    “Do you mean Mother was with him?” Dinah had been absolutely at a loss.
    “Lord, Dinah! You know Dad!” Buddy was angry at
her
, which made her feel unreasonably apologetic as she tried to piece the whole thing together. “Good Lord, grow up! Of
course
she wasn’t.”
    When she had insisted on flying out, he had discouraged her. “You can see Dad when he gets out of the hospital. I don’t think Polly wants any company, really. Not right now, at least.” So Buddy had understood something about their mother that Dinah had not, because she had come home, anyway, and she had been useless and in the way. On the plane going home, however, she had imagined all the circumstances that might have been possible. The exotic ménage à trois. She was not altogether surprised, because her father’s nature was so extreme that, once she thought about it, she realized something just this dramatic had always been likely to happen.
    While her father was in the hospital recuperating, Dinah stayed with her mother, but she could not help her mother deal with what was quite plainly just relief. Polly’s habitual expression of mildly penitent suffering had fallen away and been supplanted by a look of almost triumphant resignation which settled over her features and her tense body. She had loosened and gone lax at every joint. In the post office and at the grocery store the whole thing was discussed and puzzled over, because her father had been shot in the hip and leg at a little motel on the outskirts of Fort Lyman. Both the man who shot him and the woman with the man were said to have been drunk. By the time Dinah saw her father, she had been made too embarrassed to ask, and he was no less fierce; he didn’t seem to feel he owed her any explanation. He wasn’t feeling guilty or apologetic at all; in fact, he even seemed amused, which fueled Dinah’s imagination like kindling.
    The story, as it circulated around town, was confusing, and everyone wanted to get at the core of it, though no one, of course, asked any member of the family about it. They simply offered their condolences when Dinah went down for the paper, as though her father had had a stroke. But Polly had begun at once, as though something had been confirmed, to sort and pack up her father’s belongings.
    “Oh, of course he won’t be coming back
here!
” she said to Dinah with impatience and irritation, obviously wishing Dinah would not ask questions of her. And any questions Dinah did ask, Polly met with a look of exasperation. “Oh, Dinah, for heaven’s sake…” and she would trail off to one room or another or go take a long bath.
    Her father’s recuperation had taken a long time, and, indeed, he had not