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

the crooked seams down the backs of her legs into straight lines. After pulling on her dress, her mother would take the cut-glass vial of Narcissus perfume off her dressing table and dab her wrists and throat and behind her ears with the stopper. Jude would hold out her own wrist for a dab. After her parents’ departure, she would lie in bed with her wrist to her nose, breathing in the sweet floral fragrance of her beautiful vanished mother.
    Jude held the letter to her nose and took a deep whiff, gazing at the photo on her nightstand of her mother smiling into the camera, holding Jude’s cheek to her own, black hair waving around her face like seaweed around a drowning swimmer.
    Jude remembered the poor dead doll she’d left lying on the operating table. She got up and cradled it for a moment in her arms. Then she hurled it into the back of her closet and slammed the door.
    Hiding the shoe box under her bed, Jude worked on the letters whenever the coast was clear. One evening, Clementine asked as she carried corn bread in from the kitchen, “Miss Judith, what you be doing alone in your room all the time, honey? You ought to be outdoors playing with the other children.”
    â€œNothing. Reading. Thinking.”
    â€œI guess we’re raising an intellectual here, Clementine,” said her father as he cut the meat loaf. He still wore pale green scrub clothes from the hospital and looked very handsome with the candlelight reflecting off the ever-larger bald patch on his head.
    â€œWhat’s an ‘interlectual’?” asked Jude, swinging her legs in her chair, pretending she was pumping really high in a swing.
    He laughed. “An intellectual is someone who knows what the word intellectual means.”
    â€œI don’t want to be one anyway,” said Jude with dignity. “I want to be a medical missionary. Either that or a person who makes little girls’ shoes that aren’t silly.”
    â€œSame difference,” said her father. “One heals souls and the other heels soles.” He practically fell into his plate laughing.
    Jude liked seeing him so happy all of a sudden. But it bothered her that he never stared anymore at the photo of her mother in the wine bottle when they sat together in his brown leather chair listening to John Cameron Swayze. Her mother was talking in her letters about how much she missed him, but here he was cavorting in back alleys with a floozy. It just wasn’t right.
    â€œI don’t get it.” Jude looked to Clementine for clues to her father’s hilarity.
    Clementine shrugged and limped toward the kitchen in her huge white shoes. Apparently, her arthritis was acting up, which meant rain was coming soon.
    Her father sighed. “I wish there were some intellectuals around this place,” he said, passing her the corn-bread squares, “to appreciate my bons mots.”
    â€œAin’t nobody here but us chickens,” drawled Clementine from the doorway. It was the punch line from a joke they all loved.
    As Jude and Clementine giggled, her father shook his head.
    J UDE AND M OLLY CLIMBED into Jude’s father’s army-surplus jeep. When Jude was younger, he used to wrap her in a blanket and let her sleep on the backseat while he paid house calls back in the hills. If she woke up, she’d sneak over to the lighted windows, through which she might see tall, thin mountain people with gaunt faces and hollow eyes. Sometimes she’d watch her father lance boils or stitch wounds by lantern light.
    Her father drove them across the pasture behind her grandmother’s house and down through the Wildwoods, the olive hood bobbing and the power lift clanking on the back. The mountains lay spread out below them, a lumpy crazy quilt of rust and mauve and mustard and dark green.
    As they sifted the dark loam along the riverbank in the slanting golden rays of the setting sun, Jude’s father told Molly the story about his