Read Morning Glory for Free Online Page B

riveted upon the white slice curling softly from the blade.
    She stabbed it with the tip of the knife and picked it up. “You want it?”
    Oh, God, not again. His hungry eyes flew to her face, taking on the look of a cornered animal. Against his will, the memory was rekindled, of Weeks, the prison guard, with his slitty, amphibian eyes and his teeth bared in a travesty of a smile, his unctuous voice with its perverted laughter. “You want it, Parker? Then howl like a dog.” And he’d howled like a dog.
    “You want it?” Eleanor Dinsmore repeated, softer this time, snapping Will back from the past to the present.
    “Yes, ma’am,” he uttered, feeling the familiar knot of helplessness lodge in his throat.
    “Then all you got to do is say so. Remember that.” She dropped the bread beside his soup bowl. “This ain’t jail, Mr. Parker. The bread ain’t gonna disappear and nobody’s gonna smack your hand if you reach for it. But around here you might have to ask for things. I’m no mind reader, you know.”
    He felt the tension drain from him, but he held his shoulders stiff, wondering what to make of Eleanor Dinsmore, so dictatorial and unsympathetic at times, so dreamy and vague at others. It was only the painful memories that had transported him—she wasn’t Weeks, and she wouldn’t make him pay for picking up the food.
    The bread was soft, warm, the greatest gift he’d ever received. His eyes closed as he chewed his first bite.
    They flew open again when she grunted, “Humph!”
    Puzzled, he watched her turn her back and move across the room to fetch a crock full of the most beautiful lemon-bright butter in the world. She came back and held it just beyond his reach.
    “Say it.”
    He swallowed. His shoulders stiffened and the wary look returned to his face. His voice came reluctantly. “I’d like some o’ that butter.”
    “It’s yours.” Unceremoniously she clapped it down, then herself, across from him. “And it didn’t hurt you one little bit to ask for it, did it?” She brushed off her fingers and admonished, “Around here you ask, ‘cause things are in such a mess it’s the only way you’ll find it most of the time. Well, go ahead, butter your bread and eat.”
    His hands followed orders while his emotions took additional moments to readjust to her quicksilver mood changes. As he bent over his soup, she warned, “Watch you don’t overdo it. Best if you eat slow till your stomach gets used to decent food again.”
    He wanted to tell her it was good, better than good, the best he remembered. He wanted to tell her there was no butter in prison, the bread there was coarse and dry and certainly never warm. He wanted to tell her he didn’t remember the last time he’d been invited to sit at somebody’s kitchen table. He wanted to tell her what it meant to him to sit at hers. But compliments were as foreign to him as crocks of butter, so he ate his bread and soup in silence.
    While he ate she brought out her crocheting and sat working on something soft and fuzzy and pink. Her wedding ring—still on her left hand—flashed in the lanternlight inrhythm with the hook. Her hands were nimble, but work-worn, and the skin looked like hide. It appeared all the tougher when contrasted against the fine pink yarn as she payed it out from one callused finger.
    “What you watchin’?”
    He glanced up guiltily.
    She adjusted the yarn and smiled. The smile transformed her face. “Never seen a woman crochet before?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Makin’ a shawl for the baby. This here’s a shell design.” She spread it out on her knee. “Pretty, ain’t it?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” Once again he was assaulted by yearning, a sense of things missed, a desire to reach out and touch that soft pink thing she was creating. Rub it between his fingers as if it were a woman’s hair.
    “I’m makin’ it in pink cause I’d sure like a girl this time. A girl’d be nice for the boys, don’t you think?”
    What