Read Online The Messenger of Magnolia Street by River Jordan - Free Book Online

he’s serious. He’s thinking about Trice’s dream, and the gold rain and the clock.
    â€œWell, I guess so, I’m sitting here looking at your face.”
    He stops thinking about clocks and looks into the familiar face across the booth from him. The hair is curled up from the kitchen heat, the blue eyes are still full of spark. “How’s it look?”
    She cocks her head, “I’d say, just about like it did when you were about five years old. Just about exactly the same.”
    â€œI have a few more wrinkles.”
    â€œI’m looking in between ’em.” She would like to reach over, put the back side of her hand on his face like she did when he was a boy, but he is so new. So new all over again, and she doesn’t want to scare him away. “So now, Nephew, tell me, what is going on up there in the high and mighty business of the capitol?”
    â€œWell,” Nehemiah begins a truly serious attempt to answer when he suddenly remembers he is hungry. Then the hunger turns into something else, as if he is growling from his toes, his arches, his ankles. He is voracious. He thinks that he hasn’t eaten in, well, only a few hours, only since last night, comes to him as a surprise. But his hunger feels much older than that. Hunger that winds and growls around the empty places of his soul. Before he knows it, he isn’t eating. He is diving, rolling, wading through food. Rejoicing in food. Passionate all over again, in a brand-new way, about food. About each dish laid out before him. His knife is the conductor, his fork the first string, and he is performing for a private, delighted audience of one. He has wandered right into being love-drunk on gravy, and just another bite of that jelly on just one more biscuit. He is full of so much love, so much flour, and pinches of this and that, that his eyes water. And he can’t say a thing about the capitol. Right now it is a far, distant, disembodied land. He is living on the isle of warm comfort. He is swimming in its languid spell.
    â€œWell, then, if you don’t have anything to say about your work, what about the women?”
    And again Nehemiah can’t answer. He tries. He tries to conjure up a face of the adjunct professor he had dated for almost but not quite seven months. But instead he bites a link sausage and forks up the home fries. Says something about a “nice girl once. Went to Europe. Didn’t come back.”
    â€œShe was probably testing you and you failed.”
    Nehemiah nods but he doesn’t understand what he failed at. Doesn’t remember a test. Just a blue dress at the airport when he told her good-bye. And now that is what surfaces, a blue dress. The blue dress is wearing brown hair with sorrowful eyes and the scent of lavender.
    â€œShe was wearing blue last time I saw her.”
    â€œSee, it was a test.”
    â€œI must’ve needed you there to sort it out for me.” He gives her a wink.
    â€œYou don’t need me up there, honey. There’d be trouble in that move. Washington would never be the same.”
    While he eats, and butters, and dips, and dives, Kate fills him in on the remember-when’s. She paints pictures of his mother, tells stories of Billy and Trice and him running around swearing they had discovered treasure. “Made up a treasure map so you could find your way back. Knocked right there at that back door to the kitchen,” she points through the kitchen in the direction of the door, “and asked me for tools, for knives to guard the treasure! Can you just imagine? I gave you spoons, said, ‘Guard it with these.’”
    For the slightest second, Nehemiah hears, “Hurry up, Billy. Hurry up!” But it’s an echo and it fades before he swallows the next bite. “Then you took off again. Down to the springs. It’s a wonder you didn’t all drown. Mercy me.”
    Nehemiah’s cheeks are red, flushed. The