Read Online Garden of Angels by Lurlene McDaniel - Free Book Online

so he wouldn’t be coming to our church’s activity. “You could ask him,” I suggested.
    “Are you crazy? Then he’ll know I like him.”
    “Well, he doesn’t seem to be catching on any other way.”
    Becky Sue flopped backward dramatically. “Don’t you know anything about snagging a guy? I want
him
to figure out that he likes
me.
I can’t go throwing myself at him. He’ll think I’m desperate.”
    “Aren’t you?” Her logic escaped me.
    She threw a bed pillow at me. “You just wait until you have the hots for some boy, then we’ll see how you go about making him notice you.”
    I picked up the pillow. “Well, if I ever do, what advice would you give me?”
    “I’d tell you to ask your sister. If her soldier boyfriend is as good-looking as you say he is, then she sure knows more about catching boys than I do.” Becky boosted herself up on her elbows. “You sure you’ll be back in time for the hayride on Saturday?”
    “Papa says we’ll be home by six.” Dropping Adel off at the army base was taking less time because Barry met us at the guard gate.
    “Come straight to my house and Mom will run us up to the church together.”
    I agreed readily, because I really didn’t want to show up alone. “You never did tell me which sweater you liked best on me.”
    Becky Sue pursed her lips, pondering the choices. “The blue one,” she finally said. “It matches your eyes, which, by the way, are your best feature.”
    I held the blue sweater under my chin and checked out my reflection in the mirror over my dresser. The color did complement my eyes. I wondered if Jason had ever noticed the color of my eyes. Suddenly I remembered that by the time he’d see me on Saturday night, it would be dark. He wouldn’t be able to
see
the color of my eyes.
    The house where Mama rented a room had been built in the 1930s and was located on a quiet tree-lined street. I thought the place depressing but kept my opinion to myself. Mama’s room held a bed and a dresser, an overstuffed chair and a braided rug. There was a white-tiled bathroom across the short hallway, and Mama had free use of the living room, where the furniture lay wrapped in slipcovers and the windows were masked by heavy floral-print drapes. Pictures of people none of us knew lined the end tables. There was an old black-and-white TV set in one corner, with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil for better reception.
    When we came to visit, Papa toted in chairs from the kitchen so that we’d all have a place to sit. If the weather was pretty and Mama was feeling up to it, we’d sit out on the old porch.
    I was hoping that Mama’s treatments were doing her a powerful lot of good on the inside, because they weren’t doing her any favors on the outside. She looked pale and thin, and she had taken to wearing a bandana because her once shiny auburn hair was falling out in clumps. Her arms were bruised from the IVs. Dark circles under her eyes seemed to grow deeper each week. We never asked how she was feeling, because any fool with half a brain could tell she hurt.
    That Saturday of the hayride, I was alone with Mama at the house because Papa and Adel had gone to the store to buy her ice cream and some other things she needed. “The chemo gives me powerful odd cravings, when I can keep food down,” she’d told them. “And ice cream helps the sores inside my mouth feel better.”
    So we were together alone for the first time since before she’d come to the hospital. She was sitting up in the bed. The room felt stuffy, but she had said she was cold, so I didn’t dare open the window.
    “How have you been, Darcy?” she asked me.
    Tears welled up in my eyes. “I miss you, Mama. I miss coming home from school and you being there. I miss the way things used to be.”
    She took my hand and urged me onto the bed beside her. She wrapped her arms around me and let me cry. “I miss you too. I want to come home so much. But I can’t just yet. I have to get