Read Terms of Endearment for Free Online Page A

movie magazines and find out how things stood with his marriage. She had never been able to keep away from movie magazines; they seemed to accumulate in her grocery bag. Emma heaped much contempt on her for reading them, so much that she was forced to keep them in her laundry basket and read them behind locked doors, or in the dead of night. The minute the show was over she called her daughter again.
    “Guess who was on the Today show?” she said.
    “I don’t care if Jesus was on the Today show,” Emma said. “What do you mean, hanging up on me? First you wake me up,then you insult me, then you hang up. Why should I even talk to you?”
    “Emma, do be civil,” Aurora said. “You’re much too young to be so difficult. Besides, you’re going to be a mother.”
    “I don’t even want to be one now,” Emma said. “I might turn out like you. Who was on the Today show?”
    “André,” Aurora said.
    “Groovy,” Emma said sulkily, not very interested. She had gotten dressed but had not been able to calm down. Flap was sound asleep, so there was no real point in cooking breakfast. If Danny would only turn up she could make him some pancakes and hear all about the trouble he had managed to get himself into; she was dying to see him, dying to hear what had happened to him, but at the same time the thought that he might suddenly be standing outside the door filled her with apprehension.
    “Why are you so nervous?” her mother asked, keying in on the apprehension instantly.
    “I’m not nervous,” Emma said. “Don’t you start prying into my life. You shouldn’t be talking to me now anyway. It’s time for your suitors to be calling.”
    Aurora observed that that was true. None of her suitors would have dared call before eight-fifteen, nor would they dare neglect her past eight-thirty. In various parts of Houston, at that very moment, men were fidgeting because her line was busy, each wishing that he had been bold enough to call at eight-fourteen, or even eight-twelve. Aurora smiled; all that was satisfying knowledge. Still, she was not about to let the fact that her fellows were calling stay her from her maternal investigations. Her daughter was being much too secretive.
    “Emma, I smell a rat in your tone,” she said firmly. “Are you contemplating adultery?”
    Emma hung up. Two seconds later the phone rang again.
    “Even Stephen,” Aurora said.
    “I’m contemplating murder,” Emma said.
    “Well, we’ve never had a divorce in our family,” Aurora said, “but if we have to have one, Thomas is a good place to start.”
    “Goodbye, Momma,” Emma said. “Speak to you tomorrow, I’m sure.”
    “Wait!” Aurora said.
    Emma waited silently, chewing a nail.
    “Dear, you’re so abrupt,” Aurora said. “I’m eating, you know. It can’t be very good for my digestion.”
    “What can’t?”
    “Being spoken to abruptly,” Aurora said. She would have liked to sound despondent but was so perked up from seeing André that she couldn’t manage it.
    “It’s a very disappointing way to start the day,” she went on, doing her best. “You seldom let me finish and you never say kind things to me anymore. Life is so much pleasanter when people say kind things to one another.”
    “You’re wonderful, you’re sweet, you have gorgeous hair,” Emma said tonelessly and hung up again. Once she had tried to write a short story about herself and her mother; she had described the world as one vast udder from which her mother spent her life milking compliments. The figure hadn’t really worked, but the basic premise was accurate enough. It had taken her years to get to the point where she could hang up when she didn’t feel like being milked.
    She went outside and sat on the steps of her little porch in the bright sunlight, waiting for Danny. It was his hour—he loved to come for breakfast and would sit in the kitchen quietly ogling her while she cooked. He always pretended to be deeply exhausted from his