Read Online The Uninnocent by Bradford Morrow - Free Book Online Page A

up straight. I wrung the towel, folded it, replaced it on the rack to dry. As I did, I caught myself thinking that if I ever had to go to another funeral service it might best be my own, since the three I’d attended—my father’s when I was young, Desmond’s in my early twenties, and now Mama’s, leaving me behind in my new role of middle-aged bachelor lady—left me feeling as depleted and barren as a dead cornstalk in a winter field.
    What happened next startled me out of my doldrums. I was surprised to see, reflected in the mirror, Georgia leaning, arms crossed, lightly against the jamb of the bathroom doorway. She was looking at me with an expression indescribably strange. Quizzical. Her puzzled oval face, pretty and punctuated by sharp features, whiter than the veiny marble of the sink, was set off by her black dress and dark hair. She seemed a different person than the Georgia I’d always known, little that I actually knew her.
    She smiled, lips tight. “That better?”
    I turned off the water and nodded at her mirrored image.
    â€œSee? I knew a little cold water would help.”
    She remained in the doorway as I straightened my hair, not really knowing what better to do with myself and uncomfortable given that odd look on her face.
    â€œDidn’t mean to startle you.”
    â€œOh, not at all,” I brightly lied, turning to face her with a tight-lipped smile of my own. “Just thought you’d gone downstairs is all. I guess Cutts is still up there in the attic.”
    â€œGod knows what’s so important he couldn’t even change out of his good suit before he had to start rummaging around in all that dust and cobwebs.”
    What’s he after? I might have begun, but Georgia made a sign for me to follow her, turned suddenly, and walked down the hallway in the opposite direction of the attic ladder, downstairs to the kitchen in the back of the house. When she turned toward me again, the color in her cheeks and neck had changed. In the haggard afternoon light, whose summer skies were gathering thunderheads in stacks of white and violet and green and gray out all the windows, her face had gone ashen.
    â€œCan we talk for a minute?” she asked, quietly.
    â€œIs it about the house? Because if it is, I won’t know what to say, Georgia.” Having literally forgotten her son’s existence, Mama had willed me her house and possessions.
    â€œNo, no. Something else completely.”
    I stood there awkward by the stove, waiting.
    â€œLook. I know it’s a bad time, terrible time, to talk about things. But since you—we never see you, and Cutts has got to be back to work day after tomorrow, I just feel I have to talk with you now.”
    Georgia sat at the kitchen table on one of the hardwood chairs, and I joined her. The table was still cluttered with bottles of old medicine, handwritten schedules for pill-giving and the administration of shots, as well as a week of dishes I had not been able to bring myself to wash. My sister-in-law looked troubled. She fidgeted with a pack of cigarettes, drew one out, lighted it, and deeply inhaled, as if it were the first breath of air she had ever taken.
    â€œAbout half a year ago, I don’t know how to say this, about five or six months ago, I got a letter—well, not a letter exactly. It was from your mother.”
    â€œOh?”
    How Georgia thought it was possible for Mama to have mailed her a letter, I couldn’t guess. Mama, invalided these past few years, and especially so during the grim final months of her life, and who only came out into the sunlight when Reverend Robotham and I carried her down into the back yard and laid her on a clean blanket next to the bed of snapdragons and black-eyed Susans she loved. I listened without questioning.
    â€œHer name was right there on the envelope. Since she addressed it to me, not Cutts, I opened it. But, Jenny, it was the darnedest thing.