Read Online Someone Like Her by Janice Kay Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

Peters modern.” She talked about how gifted his mother was at finding the tiniest of plot flaws, and how when she really loved a book she’d bring it back with passages marked. “She’d read them aloud. She did it so beautifully, as if she were on stage. I could see how much pleasure she took in language.”
    Adrian stirred. “She read aloud to me when I was little.” His voice was strange, as though the memories weren’t entirely welcome. “Even later, when I was reading myself. At first, books just a little beyond me, like The Wind in the Willows. Once I was eight or nine, I’d have died before I told anyone else, but she still read a chapter to me most nights. By then, it was stuff that was way beyond my reading level. Those books by Mary Renault about Theseus.”
    “The King Must Die,” the librarian murmured.
    “Yeah. I loved those. When she left—” he cleared histhroat. “We finished The Hobbit the night before I left to visit my grandparents. She said we’d start The Fellowship of the Ring when I got home.”
    Heart jumping into her throat, Lucy swung to face him. “She had it! Just that one! I thought it was strange, because I didn’t find the other two. It’s only a paperback, and the pages are yellowing, the way older paperbacks always are. But…she must have kept it.”
    “She’d…already bought it. I remember thinking how fat it was and wondering how long it would take us to read it. But I really liked The Hobbit, so I was okay with the idea.”
    “Did you ever read The Lord of the Rings? ” Lucy asked softly.
    “No.” His voice was harsh. “Skipped the movies, too.”
    “She never did, either.” Wendy sounded extraordinarily sad. “I suggested them once. She said no, she was waiting.”
    His hands tightened on the arms of the chair. Lucy saw his knuckles go white. “Waiting? Did she say for what?”
    Wendy shook her head. “Her voice trailed off and she looked so bewildered and unhappy I started talking about something else as if I hadn’t noticed.”
    They sat silent for a moment.
    Lucy and Adrian left shortly thereafter. They had reached the sidewalk when he stopped suddenly. “Can you give me a minute?”
    A wrought-iron bench had been placed there for library patrons waiting for a ride. He sank onto it as if his knees had given out.
    “Of course.” Watching him worriedly, she sat, too.
    He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head.He’d obviously been more shaken by talking about his mother than she’d realized.
    A little shocked that he was letting her see him so agitated, Lucy waited.
    After a minute, Adrian sighed and straightened. “I’ve forgotten so much.”
    “Most of us put away things from our childhood.”
    “I’d come pretty close to putting it all away.” He didn’t look at her. “Dad didn’t talk about her. He didn’t like it when I tried. Without a sister or brother…”
    “You had no one to…to help you keep her alive.”
    “My grandparents, of course. But after that summer I only flew up there a couple of times for shorter visits. I think Dad would have cut Maman and Grandpère off all together if they hadn’t been insistent.”
    Her heart wrung, Lucy said, “But you do remember. You just…haven’t let yourself.”
    “Yeah. I suppose that’s it.” He turned his head at last, his attempt at a smile wry and far from happy. “You’re dunking me in the deep end.”
    “If you’d rather not—”
    “No, you’re right. I’m here. Later, I’ll regret it if I don’t talk to people who knew her. Especially if—”
    His mother died without ever opening her eyes and knowing him.
    “She knew she had a son,” Lucy told him. “She mentioned you several times. As if you were so wound into a memory she couldn’t forget you. And then she’d get this look on her face.” She fell silent for a moment. “I thought…I assumed her little boy had died. So I never pressed her.”
    “You thought her grief was what derailed