Read Online News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t have the nerve to protest that I hadn’t chosen to be an only, that my parents, who’d married late, were to blame. An eldest son, my father had spent his younger years running the Yahner farm, supporting his siblings and widowed mother. Even if he’d wanted to marry, my mother often said, where would he have found the time? Her own reasons for waiting were less clear and more delicate. Plain and awkward, she had always been a homebody. Because of her shyness, school had been torture; when she dropped out of the twelfth grade, her sisters were amazed that she’d lasted so long. My aunts agreed on this point: Peg was lucky to have found a husband, even one twenty years older. That was repeated throughout my childhood, so often that it never struck me as cruel: Peg is lucky to have a husband at all.
    My aunts—Rosemary, Velva, and Fern—were brisk, no-nonsense women who’d married in their teens and raised large families. Their children were grown now, with babies of their own. These grandchildren were the subject of much discussion. Two and a half and still in diapers. Marcia lets him sleep in bed with her and Davis. I can’t see why he puts up with it. Occasionally one of the aunts would notice that I was listening as I stirred the gravy or fetched bottles of root beer for the men. Remember this when you have babies, Regina. Before you know it, you’ll be toilet-training your own. These comments thrilled and perplexed me. To my knowledge, no boy had ever looked at me twice. What made my aunts so certain that, before I knew it, one would want to marry me? Explain this, I wanted to say. Explain how it happens.
    It seemed to me then, and still does, that my aunts were made by marriage, that every defining feature of their lives—the children and grandchildren, the canning and cooking and crafting skills each possessed—was intimately connected to that long-ago moment of being chosen. My uncles Wilmer, Dick, and Bill were like all the men I knew then, soybean and dairy farmers who spoke rarely and then mainly about the weather. Yet unlikely as it seemed, I accepted that these men had the power to transform. My aunts had been pretty, lively girls—one stubborn, one mischievous, one coquettish, according to my mother — though somehow all three had matured into exactly the same woman: plump, cheerful, adept at pie making and counted cross-stitch, smelling of vanilla and Rose Milk hand lotion. That I would someday become that same woman terrified me. My only greater fear was that nobody would choose me, and I would become nothing.
    The aunts and uncles arrived promptly at two, a strange time to eat a large meal—too late for lunch, too early for supper—but this was a Schultheis Sunday tradition. After spending all morning in church, the hostess needed a few hours to get the cooking under way.
    â€œHi, stranger,” said Aunt Velva, giving Melanie a squeeze. “Didn’t you look pretty this morning? I just love that white dress.”
    â€œThank you.” Melanie winked at me over Velva’s shoulder. She had borrowed the dress from my closet, after coming to the breakfast table in a printed sundress that tied behind her neck like a halter top, leaving her back and shoulders bare.
    â€œMelanie, you can’t,” my mother had protested.
    Melanie shrugged. “It’s this or blue jeans. It’s the only dress I brought.”
    â€œWear something of mine,” my mother suggested, though nothing in her closet was likely to fit. She wasn’t fat but tall and large-boned, with broad hips and shoulders. “Or Regina’s.”
    â€œI don’t mind,” I said. “You’re welcome to wear anything you like.”
    Melanie followed me upstairs. “I forgot all about church,” she said with a conspiratorial laugh, as though this were a private joke between us. “Honestly, I haven’t been in