Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

a trustee at some posh university. One of the Ivies. And he’s a consultant for the government. Joe’s going to collect his trust fund and put it somewhere safe, and then he’s going to write a few letters. Let those places know what kind of a man his father really is.”

“Might work,” Angela said, her hands glazed with peach juice. “Might not. You know how the world works.”

“Maybe it’ll make Joe feel better,” Rachel said, shrugging.

“You all right?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Angela just shook her head, wiped her hands on her apron.

By the time the supper crowd began to arrive, Angela’s face was white, glistening, with red patches mottling her cheeks. She poured a tumbler full of cool water and drank down another tablet of salt.

“Why the hell are we baking corn bread on a day like this?” Rachel muttered. Her thick hair was tied high off her neck, but enough had escaped to cling wherever it touched her hot skin. “Get away from that damned oven, Angie, before you fall in.”

“Quit yelling at me,” Angela growled. But she closed the oven door, dropped her mitts, and ducked under the counter. “Move over.” Rachel made room for her under the ceiling fan. “My kingdom for an air conditioner,” Angela groaned.

The next day, a Sears delivery truck pulled up in front of Angela’s Kitchen. The driver opened the back doors, pulled down a ramp, hopped inside the truck, and soon reappeared with a big box on a dolly. On top of the box he set a toolbox and a coil of thick yellow extension cord.

“She’s a right good girl,” Angela said under her breath as she headed for the door.

But Rachel always did the best of her deeds when she felt the devil in her rising.

She knew she should be glad for Joe and Holly both, but instead she felt cranky and spiteful. She wanted to sit in her kitchen and eat everything in her cupboards, jar by jar. She wanted to sleep all day and lie awake in the hammock all night, watching the bats that were a shade blacker than the sky, wondering what the night birds thought of them. Wondering what papayas tasted like. Wondering anything but what Joe was doing without her.

She wanted to feed Pal with tenderloins and fresh eggs until she stopped sitting by the door, her ears cocked toward the road, waiting for the sound of Joe’s return. She wanted to go about her business, get on with her life, but she felt too listless to bother with much of anything.

In the evenings she sat on her front porch with Pal, listening to her parents’ old records, one after the other, until the stars eased through the fabric of a sky made threadbare by approaching night. The songs left her so sad that she felt almost afraid for herself. She listened to Ed Ames singing “Try to Remember,” Andy Williams singing “Moon River,” Judy Collins singing about sons.

At night she lay in her bed and imagined Joe eating crabs on Fisherman’s Wharf, dancing at a diner in Sausalito, laughing with strangers. She imagined him standing on a beachhead, looking out over the extraordinary Pacific, letting the cold, salty air rush over him, his back firmly toward the east. But most of all she imagined him with Holly.

She couldn’t stop thinking of the two of them, a continent away, linked by blood and adversity, two of the strongest bonds there are. Rachel could not imagine that Joe would spend any of this time away thinking about Belle Haven or about her, unless it was to rehearse how to say he wouldn’t be coming back. The more she thought about this, the more convinced she became that Joe would be seduced by the West, commit himself to the sister he had long thought dead, and put Belle Haven behind him. She was not hurt that he had gone without her, for it had never occurred to her that she too might go. But it hurt that he had gone at all, even though she understood why he had.

For three days she listened for the phone to ring, and when after that Joe had not called, she unplugged her phone, gagged it with its cord, and threw it under a chair.

On the third night since Joe had left Belle Haven, Rachel dreamed that he was lying in her hammock with his hat over his face, his hands behind his head, his long legs crossed. When she sat down beside him, the hammock tipped him over so that he had to grab her around the waist to keep from falling. And when the hat fell to the ground, she looked down, laughing, and saw that it was not Joe lying there in her hammock but the young man who had fed her ice cream from an unclean bowl, whose sheets she had bloodied, whose face she had all but forgotten. Harry’s face. Harry Gallagher. Whose name tasted like bad meat in her mouth.

On the fourth day since Joe’s departure, Rachel awoke to the sound of birds outside her window. Listening to the sound of them, she remembered the feel of Joe in her arms.

She knew why she had mixed him up with Harry in her dream, but as she lay in her bed she wondered why Harry’s common brand of barbarism had stayed alive in her blood for so long. Perhaps, she thought, what he had done seemed more heinous in the context of her placid adolescence. People had always been kind to her. Belle Haven had been a wonderful place to grow up in. Perhaps, she thought, she had been too lucky. She had certainly been naïve. This town, which had kept her safe, had also kept her from knowing the world. Perhaps, in consequence, Belle Haven had made her a perfect mark.

The birds were still singing. A shaft of sunlight slowly approached her bed. There was a cool breeze coming through the nearest window. “Enough.”