Read Online Five Minutes in Heaven by Lisa Alther - Free Book Online Page A

pastures, where sleek cattle grazed and blackbirds sang.…”
    â€œMay I please be excused?” asked Jude, laying her napkin on the damask tablecloth, desperate not to hear again about the joys of plantation living.
    â€œW HAT’S A FLOOZY ?” Jude asked Clementine on her way out the door to school the next morning.
    Clementine paused as she mopped the redbrick kitchen linoleum with the golden liquid that smelled so good and tasted so terrible. “Where you heard that word, Miss Judith?”
    â€œMy grandma said my daddy’s running around with a floozy.”
    Clementine grinned, leaning on her mop handle. “That a fact? Good for him.”
    â€œWhat’s a floozy?”
    â€œA floozy is…um, a woman who likes to have some fun.” She tucked a coil of springy hair beneath the edge of her head cloth.
    â€œBut what about my momma in heaven?”
    â€œSugar, be glad if your daddy’s found him a new woman friend. He be a good man, and he been so lonely for so long. It don’t mean he love your momma less. Fact is, I’d say he got him a graveyard love for your momma.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œA graveyard love be a love that lasts till you both be dead and buried in the graveyard. Like what I expect you got with Miss Molly. A graveyard love don’t never end, no matter what.”

CHAPTER

4
    J UDE WAS OPERATING atop the desk in her bedroom on a doll her grandmother had just brought her from India. She had removed and set aside the red-and-gold silk sari. Now she was carefully snipping open the cloth belly with scissors. Reaching into the aperture, she extracted the wad of stuffing that was the dead baby. Once the baby was out, she hoped the mother could be saved.
    After sewing up the incision with red thread, Jude discovered that her patient had stopped breathing. Turning her over, she administered artificial respiration, repeatedly pressing her back and lifting her elbows. But she still refused to breathe.
    Jude had never lost a patient before. Feeling her throat tighten so that she could hardly swallow, she stumbled down the carpeted hallway and into her father’s bedroom, which was painted lime green and had a gold quilted bedspread and velvet drapes. She searched the floor of his closet for a shoe box, intending to dig a grave in the backyard and make a headstone from a brick. Finally, she found a coffin, but unfortunately it was full of letters.
    Carrying the box into her room, Jude plopped down on her bed and examined the French stamps on some of the envelopes, which featured the head of a woman statue with wavy stone hair. The letters were between her mother and father while he was away at the war. She removed one from an envelope that had an American eagle stamp. The paper was light blue, and the handwriting was small and squiggly. Right in the middle of the page, Jude spotted her own name.
    Being in the top reading group now that she was in second grade, Jude used her father’s dictionary to decipher the paragraph containing her name: “Your mother and I rode the train to our nation’s capital last week. One afternoon we visited the National Cathedral. While we were looking up at the beautiful stained-glass window, we discovered that Jude, whom I was carrying on my hip, was blowing out all the votive candles in the rack beside us. Darling, I have my hands full with this marvelous child of ours! How I despise this awful war, which has taken so many men away from the wives and children who need them….”
    The letter paper smelled like her mother’s favorite perfume. Closing her eyes, Jude remembered sitting on the pale green carpet in her parents’ bedroom watching her mother get dressed for parties. She’d let Jude fasten the lacy tops of her silk stockings to her garter belt. Jude had been fascinated by the way the little padded buttons slid into the wire hooks. Then her mother would ask her to arrange