Read Online Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle - Free Book Online

let James leave for work and off I’d go home. He didn’t know of it half the time, didn’t need to know, and it helped to pass the time. Imagine that me and my mama didn’t have a better thing to do but to pass the time. That’s why I never would have married a man who would carry me from my home.” She had looked hard at Virginia, her eyes so clear and honest. “I would have been scared I’d never get back. And those were good days with my mama. I’ve always been so glad that I was there with her when she died.”
    Virginia opens her eyes now, her head feeling so heavy that she can’t even cry. And she wants to; she feels like she’d like to scream her lungs out because she did marry a man who will take her from her home, already has, slowly, bit by bit, moving further and further from what she knows. And one day it will be Gram and the news will come to her in a long-distance call the same way it did when Roy Carter died, and she will hang up that receiver and turn to face rooms and windows and faces so unfamiliar and she will say: Why? Why am I here this way?

PART 2

C INDY SINCLAIR SNIPES Sinclair Biggers Sinclair is so pissed off, which isn’t unusual given her frustrated state, and that’s all it is—frustration with a capital F. It is not some personality DEFECT, some disease of the mind like that shrink would have liked for her to believe. “Paranoid,” he had said as if that meant one thing to her. “Paironerds,” she said to that man and his secretary on her way out. “Masochist” is another word he used and she is dead sure that he was feeling her out to see if she did any kinds of way out stuff. Well, she didn’t or doesn’t, but she sure as hell knows what’s going on, mainly because her best friend, Constance Ann Henshaw reads all of those magazines that are wrapped in brown paper down at the Quik Pik. Constance Ann swears that she only buys those books for a little humor, that she never looks at the pictures. Constance Ann swears that in real life she has never glanced down at a man’s covered up privates which Cindy knows is a lie. Everybody has done that whether they know or admit it. Where else are you supposed to look in those underwear ads but there.
    Well, Jim Palmer ain’t the norm and Cindy knows that for su2re; she ought to know, been married two times and has every intention of marrying again. She admits that she has checked men out that way; men do it all the time. Men will glance down at your boobs and back up to your mouth the whole time you’re trying to talk. Of course, maybe men don’t do that to everybody; Cindy has got something for them to see is all, and they can’t help it. She’d wonder about a man that didn’t look. Hell yes, she’ll admit all that and it has nothing to do with therapy. It’s just the truth. She admitted a lot of truths to that shrink before she realized what he was up to and hesuggested that he might should “admit” her. You admit the truth and they want to admit you, make commitments that you can’t possibly on God’s green earth keep and they want to commit you.
    “It sounds like a love/hate situation,” that shrink said. It didn’t matter who she talked about, her parents, Ginny Sue, Constance Ann, the old relatives, or Charles Snipes, that’s what he said.
    “You sound like a damn parrot,” she told him. “I’ve paid money to come here and have you say that same thing over and over, love/hate, love/hate. My daddy is dead and nobody in his right mind hates a dead person; Ginny Sue is like a sister to me and that’s why she pisses me off. Pissed off is what sisterhood is all about.”
    “What about your real sister?” he asked, looking just like those sea monkeys that grin and wave from the comic books like they can think when they ain’t anything but little midget shrimp. Give a man a diploma and a desk and he’ll sit there and grin and wave like he’s something he isn’t.
    “Catherine is a slut,” Cindy said.