LITMIR.BIZ

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actually knew she had been thirteen. It was the summer her father had left them, she remembered, when she had been lost and frightened, emotionally traumatized by a lifetime of being caught in the crosshairs on the battlefield of a horrible marriage.

      When her mother—seeking attention, as always—made a halfhearted suicide attempt and was subsequently committed to the psychiatric treatment unit at the local hospital, Robert Drake had once more shrugged off responsibility for her.

      How could he possibly be expected to take in a frightened girl? He had just moved in with his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, and Pam wasn’t at all prepared to handle that kind of responsibility. Besides, they just didn’t have room. She would have so much more fun staying at Annabelle’s, where her favorite cousin, Jessica, was living with her recently widowed mother.

      For Robert, it had been the perfect solution. For Lucy, it was just another betrayal, made bearable only by Annabelle and Jessica and the magical escape she found that summer in books.

      When her mother was released, she moved back to Denver with Betsy but she’d never forgotten those treasured hours reading on the shaded porch swing on hot July afternoons or under the big maple tree out back.

      “You’ve read them, right?” she asked Faith now.

      The girl shook her head. “Not yet. I’ve been wanting to but I never started.”

      She was not quite eight, much younger than Lucy had been when she’d read them. Maybe she wouldn’t enjoy them as much.

      Despite her worry, Faith looked delighted and picked the first book out of the collection and opened it up right there in the living room.

      “What about me?” Carter asked, not to be outdone. “Which one should I read?”

      She looked through the collection and pulled out Charlotte’s Web.

      “Have you read this? It’s one of my favorites.”

      “Is that the one about the spider and the pig?” he asked.

      “The very one.”

      “Daddy checked it out of the library for us once but we were reading something else and never had time for that one before we had to return it.”

      “Now you have your own copy and don’t have to take it back to the library. Why don’t we start it tonight?”

      “Okay!”

      “Faith, do you want to stay out here and read your book or come into Carter’s room and listen to Charlotte’s Web?”

      “I’ll come with you.”

      Carter led the way back to his room, still decorated the way Jessie had left it, with a Western Americana theme: red, white and blue, with horseshoes holding up some shelves and a trail of stars stenciled around the ceiling.

      It was a cute room for a boy, perfect for an active kid like Carter.

      The sharpness of loss clutched at her chest again. Jessie had loved her family, being a mother, making a comfortable home for them. Of all the gross inequities in the world, Lucy considered it so unfair that this loving young mother with her life ahead of her would be taken from her family by a health condition nobody could have anticipated.

      The room had two twin beds, maybe in anticipation for the day when Carter would have shared this room with his brother, who had been too gestationally immature to survive outside the womb after Jess went into cardiac arrest so suddenly.

      Carter jumped onto one of the beds, and Lucy forced herself to push the sadness away.

      “Daddy usually reads to me from the other one. You can do that, too.”

      She eased down onto the bed, and Faith curled up at her feet, pulling a throw over herself and listening raptly while Lucy began reading the story about a runt piglet and the spider who was a very brave friend—and a good writer, too.

      By the time she finished the first chapter, Carter’s eyelids were drooping. Judging by his energy level every time she saw him, she completely understood why. An object in constant motion eventually had to run out of steam. She didn’t know if that was an actual physics principle, but it definitely applied to five-year-old boys.

      He closed his eyes at the same moment she marked her page and closed the book. She slid off the bed and pulled his blanket up over his shoulders, awash with tenderness for this funny little man.

      “You got through a whole chapter. That’s great. My dad usually falls asleep after about two pages while he’s reading to Carter,” Faith confided in a whisper.

      Like his son, Brendan put in a long, busy day, as well.

      “I guess it’s lucky for both of us I made it this far. Shall we go into your room and read about Anne coming to know Matthew and Marilla?”

      “Yes!”

      Together, they walked down the hall to Faith’s room, all pink and lavender and yellow, sweet as Faith herself.

      “Oh. Look at that! That’s the chair you told me about on the phone a few months ago. I’d forgotten about it, but it’s just as lovely as you said.”

      It was a slim Queen Anne recliner with curvy lines and a pretty material that seemed to bring together all the colors of the room.

      “Dad said somebody who liked to read as much as I do needed a comfortable reading nook. He bought me the light and everything. And it wasn’t even my birthday. It was a just-because present. Those are the best.”

      “I agree.” She smiled. “Do you want the chair or the bed for reading?”

      “I’ll take the bed.” Faith settled in, hands clasped on her chest expectantly.

      Lucy settled into the recliner—which was, indeed, comfortable—and proceeded to read a chapter from the book about an orphaned girl trying to make her way in her new home.

      “I think that’s enough,” she finally said, though she would have read all night if she could, she was enjoying it so much.

      “Anne is so funny,” Faith declared.

      “She is,” Lucy responded.

      The girl was quiet as Lucy rose from the recliner, laid the book on her bedside table and tucked in her quilt a little more snugly around her.

      “I wonder how her mom died,” Faith finally asked, her voice low.

      This poor little child, who had lost her own mother too young. Lucy wanted to cry suddenly that Jess would never have the chance to know the funny, sweet, courageous girl her daughter was becoming.

      “If I recall from reading the series all those years ago, she was only a baby when both of her parents died of an illness.”

      “That would have been easier,” Faith said, her voice solemn. “She probably didn’t know them enough to miss them.”

      “Oh, honey.”

      She reached down to the bed and hugged Faith, wondering if the girl was open with her father about her grief or if she tried to protect him from it, as appeared to be her nature.

      “It’s normal to miss your mom,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “You know that, right? Some part of you will always have a little hole. My mom died almost twenty years ago, and I still miss her.”

      Despite her emotional and psychological issues, Betsy had still been her mother. Lucy knew she probably missed what she wished she had in a mother more than the actual person, but the loss was no less acute.

      “More than anything,” she went on to Faith, “I wish that I could patch that hole for you and take away your sadness. But that would also mean taking away all your wonderful memories of your mom, and I would never, ever want to do that. You’re sad because you miss her. I miss her, too. Your dad and Carter do, too.”

      “I

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