Read After the Frost for Free Online

it. He felt Lillian's fingers on his elbow. Mechanically he walked with her to the nearest pew and slid onto the smooth wooden seat. He took the Bible she placed into his hands and let it fall open. Belle wasn't looking at them any longer. She had taken her seat with the others. But he knew people were looking at her—and him. He heard the whispers, quiet little daggers piercing his skin, and the warm air suddenly seemed muggy and suffocating. He felt dizzy with the pain in his temples.
    "Welcome, neighbors." Reverend Snopes walked to the pulpit, his dark robes billowing around his corpulent knees. "Please open to Luke ten-thirty, and let us begin . . ."
    What the hell was she doing here? It was Sunday, for Christ's sake.                         *
    " 'A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves . . ."'
    She wouldn't even go to church for funerals, much less a Sunday service.
    "'. . . stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead . . ."'
    Rand felt as if the world had turned upside down. He was more stunned by this than by her unexpected visit the day before yesterday, because this was more puzzling, more unexpected. He stared at her, seeing every detail: the way the rapid fanning of the woman beside her stirred the tendrils of hair escaping from her braid, the way her shoulders shifted beneath the yellow muslin delaine, and he had the sudden urge to yank her outside and demand to know why the hell she had come to church this morning.
    Then he felt Lillian's hand on his wrist. Her fingers tightened on his skin, both a warning and a comfort, and Rand forced himself to take a deep breath, to close his eyes for a moment. Gradually the pain in his head receded slightly; the preacher's words became a meaningless murmur in the back of his mind. He knew what he would see if he opened his eyes—Lillian's tight expression, the curious glances of their neighbors—and so he kept them closed. He knew it all, had lived it all before. God, he'd thought—he'd hoped—he would never have to bear it again, but here it was, and incredibly it felt just the same. Six years later, and it felt just the same.
    Belle's sudden disappearance had spawned a hundred different stories, enough to fuel months of gossip. Even now sometimes in a bar or at a social, he heard low voices speculating about what had happened to Belle Sault, heard the half-admiring, half-disapproving "She was a character, all right," and saw the slow shaking of heads. As though there'd been a goddamned tragedy, he thought angrily.
    Rand swallowed, trying to calm himself, to banish the guilt washing over him in heady, nauseating waves. No one knew the truth anyway. It was just another example of how skillfully Lillian had smoothed over the whole thing. He couldn't remember now the story she'd told— something about Belle living with a cousin in Philadelphia, maybe—but whatever it was, Lillian had done her best to create a seamless fiction.
    Now he felt his stepmother's tension in the grip of her fingers, knew she was trying to think of how to explain the sudden reappearance of her daughter, and he wondered, a little meanly, what palatable lie she would come up with. Perhaps some tale that Belle had been held captive by Indians in the West, or maybe a story about how Belle had lost her memory. He could hear his stepmother's smiling words now: "We thought she was lost, but then—oh, it was such a miracle—she regained her memory and came back to us!"      
    The image nearly brought a sarcastic smile, and Rand forced it away, chastening himself mentally. He owed Lillian too much to be disrespectful—even in his mind. Without her he wouldn't even know he had a child, much less have Sarah with him. If nothing else, Lillian had been there for him the last six years. Without her he never would have survived.
    Rand squeezed his eyes shut, blocking from sight the yellow dress a few rows in