Read Tending to Virginia for Free Online Page B

dad,” Virginia said and was sorry she had let it slip, sorry when she saw Cindy’s eyes narrow and her face go as pale as the white eyeshadow that was right under her brows.
    “What do you mean?” She lowered her voice, took her hand off the steering wheel. “My dad isn’t well. He has cancer.”
    “He doesn’t have cancer.” Virginia’s voice was slow and deliberate.
    “Well, Miss doctor know-it-all, what is it then?”
    “You know.” Virginia stared down at the grass, feeling Cindy’s glare the whole time.
    “No, no I don’t know but I’ll tell you this much, he wouldn’t care if he knew you told people something other than the truth about him because he’s never really liked you, Ginny Sue. He is forever saying how strange acting and plain looking you are and how you’ll never amount to anything. He says you are so unfriendly and that all you’ve ever been is jealous of me and what I had. He says you’ll be lucky if you ever get a husband.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “He told me about that time he caught you in my room going through my things and I remember, I remember coming in with my tap shoes still on and you were crying because you got caught going through my things, and Mama said, ‘oh poor little Ginny Sue she didn’t mean any harm. She didn’t mean to break the vanity mirror.’”
    “But I didn’t break it.”
    “I know, I know, you were reaching up to get my best doll off of the cornice and almost fell off the vanity and in the process broke the mirror. All my daddy even said to you was ‘seven years bad luck.’ He didn’t even yell at you and you sat right there and wouldn’t say the words ‘I broke it,’ just sat there and cried until my daddy drove you over to Emily’s house where you’d be treated like a little baby, that’s what my daddy did for you.” Cindy took a deep breath. “He paid for your summer camp that one year that you got to go. Did you know that? Did you know that your parents couldn’t afford Camp Tonawanda like we could every summer and you pitched a fit to go until my daddy had to pay for it.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Ask Aunt Hannah, just ask her, and then you tell things that aren’t true about my daddy.”
    “I will ask her,” Virginia said, the anger that had brought a rush of words, things, that broken mirror, to her mind, slowly passing with the dull sick numbness that anger always leaves. “Can we forget it?”
    “Sure, sure, just forget it.” Cindy, with a sweetly put-on smile, waved her hand out the window when Madge and Chuckie came onto the front porch. “Hey baby!” she yelled and then, “Mama, I wish you’d hurry. Charles Snipes might want to see me a little bit today.”
    “Cindy,” Virginia whispered. “I didn’t mean anything about your daddy, I’m sorry that he’s not well.”
    Cindy tooted the horn right when Madge was in front of the car and laughed when she jumped. Virginia laughed too, patted Cindy’s arm and tried to get Cindy to look at her in a way that would make things okay again. “I won’t tell mother what you just now said,” Cindy said and cranked the car, not even looking at Madge who was sitting in the front seat in her burgundy pantsuit.
    “Take care, Ginny Sue,” Madge said, the heavy sighs returning. “We’re proud of you.”
    “Yes, all of us,” Cindy said. “Me and Mama and Daddy. Don’t do anything I’d do, you might have fun.” She laughed, that hand still out the window as she drove around the corner.
    “Is that the same old shitty chair we gave you?” Cindy had asked last weekend with no mention of the whole scene that followed. “I wonder if that tacky decal is still there?”
    “I never took it off,” Virginia told her, the thought coming to her that one day this chair would be sitting in some garage for some child of some child to strip through all the layers, down to the decal and on under to bare soft pine.
    “Looks better red,” Cindy said. “I never really