Read Online Fall from Grace by L. R. Wright - Free Book Online

his shirt was soaked with sweat.
    â€œSteven?”
    Slowly, he turned around.
    â€œWhat’s wrong? Who were you talking to?”
    She saw in his eyes that he had no intention of telling her.

Chapter 6
    T HAT NIGHT, HERMAN wanted to make love. Afterward he fell asleep and started snoring, but Annabelle still wasn’t tired. She lay on her back with her hands under her buttocks and didn’t feel sleepy at all.
    After a while she got up and went into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of milk and sat down at the table, in moonlight that spilled through the window. The glass had a blue-white glow even after she’d emptied it, created by the shadow of the milk still inside it, and the moonlight touching it.
    Annabelle lifted her hands and spread them wide and looked at them in the light from the moon; rough, short-fingered hands. There was a thin gold ring on the left one. Annabelle took it off and set it down on top of the table. She spread her hand again: she could see a faint mark encircling her finger, now, a circle of skin paler than the rest of her hand.
    The refrigerator began whirring. It was a sound that Annabelle liked. She enjoyed knowing that the refrigerator held so much good food; milk and eggs and butter and vegetables and fruits. She wanted a freezer, too. She’d put lots of chickens in it, bought from Erna Remple’s place up at the top of the road, and maybe they could buy a quarter of beef—lots of pot roasts and stew meat and ground beef and chuck steak, and a few good steaks and roasts for special occasions. She’d get strawberries in June, and raspberries in July, and blueberries in August, and she’d freeze them, too. And she might set one day a week aside for baking; at the end of that day she’d have bread and coffee cakes and muffins and all kinds of things to put away in the freezer. She’d get a copy of the Buy-and-Sell and find out how much they cost, secondhand.
    Annabelle got up from the table and wandered quietly through the house, peeking in at the children, keeping an ear open for sounds from the cages out back.
    She wished Herman would get rid of those animals. She didn’t like them in her life. They gave her inexplicable feelings of foreboding.
    She went into the glass-walled room and sat down in a lawn chair. The moon was large and bright in the sky and it flooded the place with light; the potted plants shone, wide awake in the moonlight.
    Annabelle stretched her legs out in front of her. Her bare feet, bare legs, the white nightgown with pink polka dots that came to her knees—everything looked glossy and silver in the moonlight. She thought she could even feel it on her skin, deep and soft like satin.
    She thought about the first time she’d seen this place. Herman had trundled them out here in the pickup and she’d gazed in horror upon an abandoned building, and two old rickety gas pumps, and a wooden sign, the paint faded and peeling, that once had said “CAFÉ.” Somebody had painted “CLOSED” across the sign in big black letters that were almost as faded as the word beneath. She’d gotten out of the truck very reluctantly. This was going to be their new home, this falling-down dilapidated dejected-looking place, and Annabelle hadn’t liked the idea one little bit.
    She’d climbed out of the truck, though, and while Herman was lecturing the kids about something or other she’d wandered closer to the building. The panes were encrusted with grime but light still managed to poke through, and the dirt-floored area between the glass wall and the wall of the house was crowded with weeds, some as tall as small trees, a thick, urgent forest of weeds that pressed against the glass walls as if against the walls of a prison.
    What on earth would Warren think of this place? As if things weren’t bad enough on that front, she’d thought.
    At least it was close to Erna, though. That was in its