Read Online Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman - Free Book Online

your dolly, Rosalie,” Virgie said.
    But England’s sooty hands, never really clean in the cracks from his dirty work of smithing and shoeing, would snag and stain the fragile blue silk of Gloria’s dress. But she’d just have to bear it.
    “Well, isn’t she a beauty. Look at that complexion. Bet she never hoed a row of cotton in her life,” he teased and smiled into Rosalie’s eyes. He held Gloria up and twirled her skirt, and, in the twirling, something caught, and she fell.
    The porcelain smashed into a hundred little petal pink-and-white pieces, shining in the firelight.
    Gloria’s soft body was intact, but her head, her hands and her feet were broken, as was Rosalie’s heart.
    It didn’t matter that England was sorry. It didn’t matter when Virgie made her a rag doll to fill the blue silk dress. The beautiful Gloria was gone before Rosalie had had a chance to love her.
    And Rosalie knew that that was the way of the world. It didn’t do to want too much, to expect anything, she told herself when she’d finished with the mourning and the crying herself to sleep at night. Life was hard and painful, and she was poor, and that was the way it was always going to be. But life would be less bitter if she didn’t expect it to be sweet.
    * * *
    That didn’t mean that she had to spend the rest of her life on the farm, though. She was willing to work hard, to do anything, but Rosalie didn’t want to spend all her days like her mother—washing, cleaning, cooking, tending after a whole mess of kids. The only way she could see to escape was to use her brains. Her teachers had always said she had plenty. There had to be a way they could earn her a living.
    But when she finished the eleventh grade, where was she going to get the money to go on? It cost over four hundred dollars for the two years of normal school in Natchitoches.
    Her brother England stepped forward. “I’ll lend it to you.” How would he scrape together the money from the few pennies he had earned on his small farm near home? But she was his favorite, and he’d always been a good boy.
    The two years flew by. She was on her own, and though her job in the school kitchen was much like the chores she did on the farm, this was different, for there were her studies, the books, the lectures, the endless pages of empty blue lines to fill with notes that would enable her to stay away from the farm forever, maybe even to be a teacher.
    And it was the twenties. Even in the rural backwater of Natchitoches there were short skirts, bobbed hair, jazzy music on the Victrola, new daring dances, and boys with slicked hair who came to call at the dormitories with silk bow ties beneath their sun-reddened Adam’s apples.
    Rosalie went out with a few of them but no one in particular. She didn’t have time for all that foolishness. She had to get ahead in school if she was ever going to make anything of herself. She’d seen, boy, had she seen, in her mother’s swelling belly every spring, what boys could do for you. That’s all they were after, anyway, when you got right down to it. She was not interested. No, thank you.
    For no matter how sweet the moonlight, the words, and the promises whispered out in a canoe late at night, they didn’t mean a hoot when you had a passel of children underfoot and could see nothing looking you in the face for the next twenty years but the raising of them, with precious little help from that young man who sat next to you now trying to nuzzle closer to the buttons of your white organdy blouse. They could jazz her and razzmatazz her, but when it came to serious business Rosalie would make whatever she made of herself on her own.
    So it was that two years later, with her normal-school diploma held proudly in her hand, she kissed her friends and family goodbye and set out alone to the eastern part of the state and nurse’s training with the nuns at the hospital in Cypress. There were no teaching jobs to be had, so, as always, Rosalie