Read Online The Thirteen by Susie Moloney - Free Book Online Page B

gentle squeeze and it was over. The visit had lasted less than twenty minutes. She had a firm impression that not only Tula but her mother also had wanted her to leave.
    As she’d headed back to her car, she didn’t know whether to feel put out or hurt or panicked that everyone was being so evasive. Maybe her mother was more ill than she let on. Terrible words dashed in and out of her head, the stiffness in her mother’s joints becoming some kind of paralysis, the drooping eyes and difficulty with speech becoming a stroke. And when she thought of the raspy throat, the worst crossed her mind. Cancer .
    Paula stuck her hands into the soapy water with a vengeance and fiercely scrubbed dishes that hardly needed it, unable to keep her mind off the fact that something just wasn’t right. Not just her mother being ill, but something else altogether.
    A car stopped in front of the house, not parking in the driveway behind her mom’s
    (pieceofshit)
    car but just pulling up to the curb. A woman got out; she was wearing big sunglasses, and as she rounded the car to the sidewalk, she pushed them up on her head just like a celebrity. Her hair was long and dark and she wore a little lavender suit. It was like something women wore on TV. Stylish.
    She was smiling at Rowan, and though her teeth were blindingly white and really even, there was some quality in the smile that distracted from her beauty, something that to Rowan looked …  hungry .
    As she came up the walk, the woman’s eyes were on Rowan, the whole time the smile plastered there
    (like the smiles on the two church women who sometimes came to their apartment door on Sundays, smiling just like that and holding out booklets with titles like God Misses You and Won’t You Come Home to God?)
    The woman stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
    have you found Jebus Mrs. Wittmore?
    When she spoke, her voice was musical, warm and rich, like …  barbecue .
    “Well, hel-lo!” The woman actually winked. “You must be Rowan.” A (musical) laugh spilled out of her perfectly pink lips. “You look just like your mother.” The syllables of your mother were drawn out. The woman kept smiling, the smile practically stuck there, for a full half-minute. It didn’t reach her eyes. Briefly those eyes flicked over Rowan’s whole self, from hair to toes, and then back up to her face.
    “You look like … your mother,” she said again, and finally she lost the smile.
    Rowan didn’t know what response she should make to that sort of declaration, especially said twice. Obviously this woman wanted her to say something. So finally she said, “Oh.” At her feet Old Tex had begun his lurching rise. Beneath the grunts and groans Rowan thought she heard him growl. She put her hand on his head when he was all the way up.
    “You’re going to be a real beauty,” the woman said, the words tumbling from her pink lips that showed her perfect white teeth, and this time Tex really did growl, though so quietly probably only Ro heard it. She scratched behind his ear.
    “Rowan. Such a pretty name. Do you know what it means?”
    “It’s a tree,” Rowan said. The dog pushed his head against her hand.
    state yer bidness stranger
    “That’s right!” the woman said.
    Weirdo number two . “Um, can I help you?”
    “I’m an old friend of your mom’s. I was her best friend in school. Her very best friend.”
    “Oh.”
    The woman continued to smile, the sun glinting off the sunglasses propped on her head.
    And?
    As if she’d heard Rowan’s thought, she purred, “I’m just dying to say hello.” She looked up at the house, and just the tiniest hint of a frown wrinkled her otherwise perfect forehead.
    Rowan decided she disliked this woman, even if she didn’t really know why. “I’ll get her. She’s just in the kitchen.”
    “No!” the woman said, and laughed again. “Let me do it.” She bent low, swooping like a bird, and scooped up a handful of gravel from beside the walk. It