Read Online You're Still the One by Janet Dailey, Elizabeth Bass, Cathy Lamb, Mary Carter - Free Book Online

the crap.
    After that avalanche everything changed. My dad came to get me. I stayed with a neighbor until he arrived. Her name was Mrs. Ashley. She cried over me many times and told me, “What a wonderful mother you had . . . we’ll all miss her, honey . Tragedy for you, for everyone here . . . all her students crying . . . heavens to Betsy, why did this have to happen?”
    My dad drove up, engine growling. He hardly glanced at Mrs. Ashley, slammed the door to his truck, which still had the bullet holes in it, and snapped, “Let’s go, Allie. Move your butt. I drove all the way out here to get you and I don’t got time to waste.”
    Mrs. Ashley and her husband were appalled. Mr. Ashley said to my dad, “Now, maybe we should talk for a sec . . .”
    “Who the hell are you? There ain’t nothing to talk about,” my dad said, his face scrunched up and angry, his scars so prominent. I didn’t know why he was angry at Mr. and Mrs. Ashley. “This is a big inconvenience to me, coming to get this kid.”
    “Her mother just died—” Mrs. Ashley had one hand to her heart and the other on my shoulder.
    “How about if you leave Allie with us for the school year,” Mr. Ashley said, adding his hand to my other shoulder.
    “No. That ain’t happening. Her whore of a mother kidnapped her and now she’s coming with me.”
    “How about another month—” Mrs. Ashley said.
    “I said no.” My dad’s hands clenched into fists.
    “Can she come and visit this summer?”
    “What are you, deaf?” my dad shouted, chest puffed out. “She’s not coming back.”
    He gave me time to pack: “Five minutes and not a minute more, apple - core face.” I cringed hearing that name.
    Mrs. Ashley raced to help me. She gave me one of her suitcases, and while she packed my clothes, I packed things from my mother in my backpack: a locket from her deceased mother and a harmonica from her deceased father, whom she never stopped missing; her favorite books; two china plates with tiny purple flowers that we loved to eat pie off of; three dessert cookbooks; and two aprons with apples, one for her, one for me. I grabbed three photos of us together in Montana. There was no time to get anything else as my dad was already shouting from outside to “Move, Allie, move!”
    I looked longingly at my picture frames with the pink ballerinas, my mother’s tablecloth with the yellow tulips, her perfume bottles, the tiny mirror with the ornate gold frame, her photograph of an apple orchard bathed in sunlight.
    My dad’s horn honked incessantly. “Get out here right now, Allie. Don’t piss me off!”
    Scared to death, I went tumbling out of the house with my backpack, Mrs. Ashley following behind with the suitcase, swearing at my dad. She called him many bad names, I remember that, and my mother had always said she was a God-fearing woman.
    We went speeding down the road, me waving and crying out the window, our blue house fading in the distance. I would not see my swing set again, my bedroom with the yellow walls, the kitchen wall where my mother had painted a mural of a tulip field. I had helped paint the tulips.
    My dad told me to “Sit down, strap up, and shut up,” and that’s what I’d done. He then grilled me the whole way about my mother and her “harem of boyfriends,” and said terrible things about her. “I hope you’re not like your mother. I won’t tolerate you being like her—loose, wild, slutty.”
    I told him she wasn’t like that at all and he punched my face, loosening a tooth. I turned toward the window and willed myself not to cry.
    That was a microcosm of what happened for the next five years. I willed myself not to cry in front of him and stuffed my emotions down, hard as I could, until I was on autopilot, hands over my head, cowering, but somehow also fighting to live.
    I rolled out the crust on the counter, my hands trembling.
    After I made that apple pie, I made another one, then another.
    It was apple pie therapy. I