Beckett's Cinderella Read Free

hadn’t know anything about him, not really—just that he was her only living relative except for a cousin she hadn’t seen in several years. She’d driven all the way across the country for a few days’ visit, hoping—praying—she could stay until she could get her feet on the ground and plan her next step.
    What was that old song about people who needed people?
    They’d both been needy, not that either of them had ever expressed it in words. We’re out of prunes. That was one of Uncle Fred’s ways of letting her know he needed her. Danged eyeglasses keep moving from where I put ’em. That was another.
    Life in this particular slow lane might lack a few of the amenities she’d once taken for granted, but she would willingly trade all the hot tubs and country clubs in the world for the quiet predictability she’d found here.
    Not to mention the ability to see where every penny came from and where and how it was spent. She might once have been negligent—criminally negligent, some would say—but after the lessons she’d been forced to learn, she’d become a fanatic about documenting every cent they took in. Her books, such as they were, balanced to the penny.
    When she’d arrived in May of last year, Uncle Fred had been barely hanging on, relying on friends and neighbors to supply him with surplus produce. People would stop by occasionally to buy a few vegetables, leaving the money in a bowl on the counter. Theymade their own change, and she seriously doubted if it ever occurred to him to count and see if he was being cheated. What would he have done about it? Threaten them with his cane?
    Gradually, as her visit stretched out over weeks and then months, she had instigated small changes. By the end of the year, it was taken for granted that she would stay. No words were necessary. He’d needed her and she’d needed him—needed even more desperately to be needed, although her self-esteem had been so badly damaged she hadn’t realized it at the time.
    Uncle Fred still insisted on being present every day, even though he seldom got out of his rocking chair anymore. She encouraged his presence because she thought it was good for him. The socializing. He’d said once that all his friends had moved to a nursing home or gone to live with relatives.
    She’d said something to the effect that in his case, the relative had come to live with him. He’d chuckled. He had a nice laugh, his face going all crinkly, his eyes hidden behind layers of wrinkles under his bushy white brows.
    For the most part, the people who stopped for the free ice water and lingered to buy produce were pleasant. Maybe it was the fact that they were on vacation, or maybe it was simply because when Uncle Fred was holding court, he managed to strike up a conversation with almost everyone who stopped by. Seated in his ancient green porch rocker, in bib overalls, his Romeo slippers and Braves baseball cap, with his cane hiddenbehind the cooler, he greeted them all with a big smile and a drawled, “How-de-do, where y’all from?”
    Now and then, after the stand closed down for the day, she would drive him to Bay View to visit his friends while she went on to do the grocery shopping. Usually he was waiting for her when she got back, grumbling about computers. “All they talk about—them computer things. Good baseball game right there on the TV set and all they want to talk about is going on some kind of a web. Second childhood, if you ask me.”
    So they hadn’t visited as much lately. He seemed content at home, and that pleased her enormously. Granted, Liza thought as she broke open a roll of pennies, they would never get rich. But then, getting rich had been the last thing on her mind when she’d fled across country from the chaos her life had become. All she asked was that they sell enough to stay in business, more for Uncle Fred’s sake