Read Online Night Light by Terri Blackstock - Free Book Online Page B

wanted to nurse her anger, she was having a hard time maintaining it. She finished setting the table. “Time to eat,” she said more softly. “Jeff and Beth, go get some chairs from the dining room.”
    As her brother and sister headed out, Logan came back in with red eyes. Doug followed him in and nodded to him.
    Logan slid his hands into his pockets and looked at the floor. “I apologize for being rude,” he said to the children.
    A canned speech if Deni had ever heard one.
    The four just stared at him, then took their places at the table as Jeff and Beth brought the extra chairs in.

eleven
    D ENI HAD TO HAND IT TO HER MOTHER. S HE WAS determined.
    Beth did kitchen detail while the rest of the family went to the lake to bring back as many barrels of water as they could. The cursory washing of the new kids’ hands and faces had gotten them through dinner, but now her mother was dead-set on getting the kids completely clean. She’d washed them out in the backyard, where she could scrub without making a mess.
    Her dad had helped, turning it into a game of sorts, making the younger three kids feel like they were playing rather than bathing. Aaron, however, looked as if he couldn’t believe the indignities. He brooded like Huck Finn being scrubbed by the Widow Douglas.
    What kind of mother would abandon her four children, especially at a time like this? Deni couldn’t even imagine, but tomorrow she planned to find out. She was going with her dad to Sandwood Place Apartments tomorrow morning to look through their things, hoping to find some clue as to where their mother could be.
    But what would they do if they found her? Drag her back and force her to be a mother? No, the kids’ best hope was to find grandparents, or aunts and uncles, who could raise them. Their mother was unfit.
    Deni’s mother was soaking wet by the time she came into the house after scrubbing the kids’ clothes clean. Since it was almost dark, she brought the wet garments in and hung them over the shower stall in the bathroom. Hopefully, they would be dry by morning.
    While Deni worked on Sarah’s tangles, her father held a powwow upstairs with the boys, trying to get as much information as he could about who their mother was and what friends she might be staying with.
    Sarah seemed more than content with all the attention being shown her. She sat on Deni’s lap, turning the pages of a children’s book that Beth had pulled from her bookshelf.
    “Your house is pretty,” she said. “And your TV is big!”
    Deni glanced at the forty-eight inch television sitting in the corner. “Yes, it is.”
    Sarah looked up at her. “Can we watch it?”
    Deni smiled. “It doesn’t work.”
    The child’s face fell. “Neither does ours.”
    “Nobody’s TV works right now.”
    Beth got down on her knees in front of them. “Sarah, if the TV worked, what would you watch?”
    “Wiggles,” Sarah said without blinking. “I have a tape with all their songs, but it don’t work, either.”
    Deni knew the Wiggles were like a rock band for preschoolers — four silly men dressed in bright colors, singing songs that children loved. She wished she’d watched that show even once, instead of surfing past it. “Can you sing me one?”
    Sarah slid off Deni’s lap, turned to face her, and launched into song, complete with hand motions. She was cuter than Dakota Fanning in I Am Sam .
    If Deni ever found this little girl’s mom, she would personally ream her. A woman like that didn’t deserve the love and respect of an innocent child like Sarah.
    “You know what?” Beth said. “I’ve been thinking about writing a play. All the little kids in Oak Hollow could be in it. We need some entertainment around here.”
    “Luke was in a play one time,” Sarah lilted. “Aaron took us. His teacher made him a tree!”
    Aaron took them. Why hadn’t their mother? That angry, belligerent street kid had cared for his siblings all this time. Deni was the oldest child in