Read The Legacy of Eden for Free Online

you were born into.”
    “I hope he knows that.”
    “He’s a shrewd man, your pa.”
    “Yeah and a sick one. Sick ones stop being shrewd and start getting sentimental.”
    “Not when it comes to money they don’t.”
    “And besides, if your pa does start to feel sentimental all’s he got to do is start remembering why he sent him away in the first place.”
    “Come on now, Dan, everyone knows that were an accident.”
    “I don’t want to talk about that.”
    “No…sure, Leo, of course. We meant no disrespect.”
    “Why, Anne-Marie, don’t you look fetching?”
    Anne-Marie turned to see her cousin, the girl she had grown up with, standing before her, a broad smile drawing a hole in her wide, pink flushed face.
    “Thank you, Louise,” she replied calmly, though she turned away briefly and slowly closed and reopened her eyes. She had not spoken with her cousin in weeks but each time she did it drained her. It ate up all her reserves to keep a neutral expression on both her tongue and her face, when secretly she wished God would just grant her lifelong wish and snap the girl’s neck like a twig.
    “So thin, though, Anne-Marie, if people were to look at you they’d think we were still in the Depression. You know I think you’ve lost weight again. You been losing it steadily ever since you left home, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to cook for yourself. I noticed Lou is thinner than he was, too. Maybe you should talk him into hiring you a housekeeper, if he can afford it on a local doctor’s wage.”
    “I wouldn’t know. I don’t question him about his finances.” Anne-Marie turned to her plate. Louise cackled in laughter and put a hand on her shoulder.
    “My God, what wife doesn’t know how much she can push her husband for? You are a funny one. The very least he can do is get you some Negro girl in the place, preferably one from down south somewhere. They don’t haggle as much as the ones up here. I insist you try, any more weight loss and people will start thinking something’s wrong with you.”
    “I’m just fine,” snapped Anne-Marie as her jaw ached under the strain.
    “But maybe not,” said Louise, cocking her head to her side and fingering the hem of Anne-Marie’s dress. “Maybe the dress just makes it seem that way. Boy, you can do anything with a sewing machine,” she said, dropping her hand away and smoothing down the cream silk that fell across her own waist and flared out at her hips. Suddenly she laughed. “Remember all those times I’d come home and find you just sewing away, always mending, always poring over your clothes and stuff. Why you didn’t just ask Daddy to buy you something new I could never understand.”
    Anne-Marie stared at her cousin. She saw her cock her head to her side and gaze at her as if she were waiting for something, always waiting for something, and then finally smiling as she used to when she saw that Anne-Marie could not think of a way to respond.
    “Daddy said you used to get that from your mother, that thriftiness.” She bent nearer to her at this point. “Truth be told, I think he was glad that’s all you got.”
    Anne-Marie cleared her throat and tried to turn away. Louise stepped back and frowned.
    “Sorry, I forgot how you never mention your mother.”
    And she never did—never. I remember my father saying how he had asked about her once. My grandmother had gotten up from her chair and left the room without saying a word, and when he had asked his father why she was that way, all my grandfather could say was, “Some things just run through you so deep, all they leave is a hole.”
    And so it was with my grandmother, so that she became little more than a void in the disguise of a woman.
    But while Anne-Marie may have refused to talk about her mother, almost everybody else did. They couldn’t help themselves after her uncle’s wife, a rotund woman who had an unfortunate partiality to loudly colored prints, had taken every