Read Ms. Miller and the Midas Man for Free Online Page B

hadn’t come off when he’d washed.
    She glanced up and he looked down at her expectantly. Clearly, he had every intention of sitting next to her and wouldn’t move until she slid over, closer to Howard. With Lydia, Alan, and two of the children on the other side of the table, and one child and Howard and her on the other, she was forced to make room for him.
    “You know,” he said cheerfully, sitting down beside her and taking up an incredible amount of room, “I’d forgotten how big that house really is.” He chuckled and reached for the ketchup, his arm brushing hers and coming back to rest against her ribs. She squirmed closer to Howard, whose body didn’t seem to generate quite so much electrical energy. “I could paint and paper in that place from now till doomsday and never be finished. I don’t know how my dad did it all those years. A couple of my sisters came over yesterday to help out.”
    “Those were your sisters?” she asked, embarrassing herself. “I mean, so those were your sisters. I...I’d been wondering if I knew any of them. I guess...I don’t.”
    If she were queen for a day, she would have had the grin he gave her slapped clean off his face, the knowing look in his eyes put out with hot pokers. As it was, she turned her attention to her food and cursed the heat in her cheeks—not that she could possibly eat anything with her heart beating so fast. Was he brushing his thigh against hers on purpose?
    “You will,” he said, deciding then and there that she was the cutest thing ever when she was flustered. Addressing the others he said, “They’re pretty good help when you can get them to work. But all they wanted to do yesterday was play and giggle and talk about when we were kids.” He took a big bite out of his burger and hummed his pleasure.
    “It must be nice, coming from a big family like that,” Lydia said, looking at her own children as they ate their food and threw potato chips at each other, then to Gus. “There was only the two of us and...well, I was raised different from Augusta.” She smiled sympathetically. “She was gifted, so instead of a childhood, she got trained.”
    Once again, the spotlight had swung around the table to focus on Gus. She sighed loudly and laid her fork down with a resigned shrug of her shoulders. She could tell they were going to discuss her private, personal life come hell, high water, flood, avalanche, hurricane...
    It was one of those afternoons.
    “It wasn’t any easier on you, being raised the way we were,” she said, feeling Scott Hammond’s attention span increasing tenfold. Under the table she fisted the fingers of her left hand and twisted her wrist around in a small circle. Around and around—then back in the opposite direction. “Our mother believes that it is every individual’s duty and privilege to be of some sort of service to the community they live in.” She glanced at Howard, who was just as attentive but much less threatening somehow. “According to her everyone has a talent or a gift for something and it should be developed extensively and given back to the world if possible. Failing that, to your race or society or your state or city.” She laughed softly. “Your ability to contribute gets progressively smaller with your failures, believe me.” She smiled at Lydia and chuckled in spite of the heaviness in her chest. “She’ll appoint herself cruise director when we finally commit her to a retirement home, you know.”
    Lydia laughed. “All those poor old people, licking envelopes and picketing cosmetic companies in their walkers and wheelchairs, taking buses out into the country to pick up trash along the highway. Finish eating, Eric,” she said to the child across from her. “Remember when everyone dropped out of Mother’s troop of Girl Scouts and joined up with Mrs. Macaby’s group because she insisted they all ban Christmas trees and ask their parents to buy living trees they could plant in their yards