Read Online Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online

been told their soldier was dead when he was just as alive as he could be! She’d also heard about a guy who was said to have sustained a “minor injury,” but he died from a massive head wound.
    Here she’d been complaining about not hearing from Julian, and he might not be able to write! How would she know? She felt like biting her knuckles, yanking at her hair. But what good would that do? She needed to be strong for him. Cheerful. She needed to be less selfish and to try much harder when she wrote to him. Surely she could do better than she had. She was never much of a writer—or a reader, for that matter—as Louise was. Even Tish liked reading a lot better than Kitty. Well, face it; everyone in the family liked reading better than Kitty. Even Billy liked his books.
“Geronimoooo!”
he’d yell, running through the house with one of his books about, well, Geronimo. But Kitty was not a reader. She was a
do
er—the kind of person books were written about, she thought, privately consoling herself.
    She wondered what Louise’s letters to Michael were like. And his to her. Already, Louise had gotten four. The first one was practically a novel. Kitty knew where Louise kept those letters—in her underwear drawer. If Kitty could read one, she would be better able to write to Julian. She’d know the tone she should take, the things Julian might be longing to hear. Not that Julian and Michael were that much alike, but still…
    “Louise?” she whispered to the still form beside her. Nothing. She sat up and looked at Tish, sprawled out at the bottom of the bed. “Tish?” Again, nothing. Slowly, she pulled back the covers, got out of bed, put on her robe, and tiptoed over to the bureau. Holding her breath, she soundlessly slid open the drawer and reached under a pile of Louise’s slips. There. A pack of letters, a length of blue velvet ribbon holding them together. She removed the letter on top and slipped it into her pocket, closed the drawer, and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. She locked the door, sat on the lid of the toilet, and pulled the onionskin pages from the envelope. She reminded herself to put the letter back exactly as she’d found it—the folded crease toward the bottom of the envelope. She hesitated for a moment, shame burning at the edges of her stomach. This was such an invasion of privacy! Really, if she were going to do this, she should read Tish’s letters. But those weren’t real relationships that Tish had. They were flirtations, distractions. Good for the men’s morale, Kitty agreed, but surely lacking the kind of thing that might inspire her to write more easily to Julian. Louise would never know Kitty had done this, and she would be glad if Kitty were better able to write Julian; she and Julian liked each other very much. And anyway, hadn’t Kitty readily shown Louise the letter Julian had sent? Fair was fair. She tucked her hair behind her ears, opened the pages and started to read, then stopped when she heard a knock on the door.
    Hastily, she shoved the pages back into the envelope, the envelope into her robe pocket. “Yes?” she said.
    “Is that you, then, Kitty?” Her father.
    “Yes, Pa.”
    “Well, hurry it up, girl, I’ve got a bit of an emergency.”
    Kitty opened the door. Here and there, her father’s hair stood on end, as though he were being selectively electrocuted. His face was creased with elongated Xs, and his pajamas had shifted sideways. No one looked more comical rising from sleep than Frank Heaney. “Here’s our Tom, come home after his nightly catfight,” their mother said every morning. “’Tis our own Clark Gable,” their father always answered.
    “I can let you go first,” Kitty told him.
    “God love you. Ben Macalister, our venerable block captain, stopped over tonight. If that man were invited to a wedding, he’d stay for the christening. And me drinking the water and drinking the water just to stay awake.” He squeezed past her and