Double Wedding Ring Read Free Page B

with Grandmother. Malorie said they had no choice right now, nowhere else to go. That they should be grateful there was somewhere she could get better, that there was someone to help her.
    She kept the sign that said Hutchins’ Lawn & Garden framed in the side-view mirror until the van turned the corner and all she could see was the high fence around the back of the building. She wanted to go down Main Street one more time so she could memorize the sign. But Susan knew that was the kind of thing that made Malorie worry her mother would never again be right, no matter how much memory she retrieved.
    As it turned out, the sign stayed in her head all the way to Grandmother’s house, anyway.
    Susan liked the street. Mimosa Lane, the sign read. Trees lined the sides, dressed for autumn in reds and golds and oranges, making Susan smile. The houses made her smile, too, houses with gables and front porches and crisp green shutters fanning out from tall, wide windows. The houses looked friendly. Maybe living on Mimosa Lane wouldn’t be such a bad thing, after all.
    Malorie stopped the van in front of the friendliest of the houses on Mimosa. White, with a second story and a peaked roof and a wooden wheelchair ramp off the screened side porch. A willow tree weeped in the front yard and stirred in Susan a desire to sweep beneath it, dancing from bough to bough, fluttering the fall of leaves with her outstretched arms. The desire was strong, almost a physical ache.
    Before Malorie could get around to the passenger side of the van, the front door of the house opened. Leading the way was Cody, laughing, barreling full speed toward the new van, which Malorie said a trucking company had bought for them. Settlement, Malorie called it. Behind the little boy, a tall, stocky man with sandy hair more than half filled with white came out behind a tall, gaunt woman whose back would never have bent enough to allow her to sweep beneath the boughs of the willow in her own front yard. Susan saw that and understood it, even if lots of other things flickered just beyond her grasp these days.
    Susan retreated into the shell her injuries allowed her to create. The same way she had retreated to her wheelchair when she left rehab, so no one could see how she walked, staggering and shaking, unsteady on her feet. Susan didn’t want to see disapproval on the face of her mother and she didn’t want to see pity in the eyes of the other person, whom she couldn’t remember right now. She didn’t want to hear the clank and rattle of the wheelchair Malorie was dragging out of the back of the van right now. She wanted this to be over. She wanted, maybe, to be back at the hospital, where at least everyone laughed with her when she called an apple a pencil. She didn’t want to be here. If her brain had to be bruised, she wanted to go back to the hospital, where everybody else was bruised and incomplete, too.
    It didn’t work that way. The man with the sandy-white hair opened the car door.
    â€œHow’s my little sis? You better not have put on any weight eating all that hospital food.”
    Then he lifted her, groaning in an exaggerated way that was supposed to make them all laugh. Susan let them all laugh. She let him place her gently in the wheelchair. She listened to Betsy Grandmother Mom Foster greet her and pretended she didn’t hear. She was being mean. Hateful. She knew it. But right now, she needed her shell. Please, God, just for right now. Just for these few minutes when I don’t want anyone to see or hear how broken I am.
    â€œMommy! Mommy!”
    The little boy stood in front of her, his blue eyes bright with delight. The stripes on his T-shirt matched his eyes. He flung himself into the chair, into her arms, filling her lap.
    â€œNow, Cody, you be careful,” admonished Grandmother. “Susan does not need you crawling all over her like that.”
    So Susan put her good arm around the hard little body