Hard Truth Read Free

and chemotherapy her doctors had recommended.
    Put in that context, no discussion had been necessary among Mary Beth’s children, other than how much land to sell off at any given time. Lorna’s younger sister, Andrea, married, the mother of two young children—she was now expecting her third—and living in Oklahoma, had left it all up to Lorna. Rob, the youngest and only boy, an aspiring actor who had left for Los Angeles the day he turned eighteen and had never come back, hadn’t bothered to respond to the several messages Lorna had left on his answering machine, which really hadn’t surprised her at all, though he’d had plenty to say about it when he came home for the small, private memorial. Once he found out how much the land could be worth, that is.
    In the end, Lorna did what she felt was best for their mother. The money from the sale had given Mary Beth fifteen months of treatment in a fine hospital thirty minutes from Lorna’s house. Lorna wouldn’t have traded those fifteen months for all the Palmer land. In the end, her mother had lost the fight anyway, and the loss of a few acres was totally irrelevant, as far as Lorna was concerned.
    She got out of the car, marveling at how quiet it was even for a Sunday afternoon in late summer. She inhaled deeply, recognizing the familiar smells of earth after a rain—wild roses and ripe grapes. A few daylilies were still in bloom along the fence that surrounded the field across the drive from the house, and Lorna wondered if someone had been tending them. When Lorna first moved Mary Beth to Woodboro, where Lorna’s home and business were located, she’d asked Gil Compton, a neighboring farmer, to keep an eye on the property and let her know when things needed to be done, and had offered to pay his son to mow the grass. Mr. Compton had kept the property as neat as Lorna’s father had, made sure the heating oil in the tank never ran out and the timer never failed to turn the lights on inside the house every night, but he refused every attempt she’d made to pay him for his troubles.
    “No trouble at all, Lorna,” he’d insisted. “Your mother was a godsend when our oldest was in that car accident a few years back, driving my wife down to Wilmington three times a week to the hospital. If it weren’t for her, neither of us would have been there when Kevin died. Thanks to Mary Beth, at least Kim was with him at the end. So you just go on and do what you have to do for your mother, and don’t you give a second thought to what’s going on down here. I’ll take care of the farm as if it were my own.”
    And he had, bless him. From looking at the farm, no one would ever guess it had been uninhabited for almost a year and a half.
    Lorna stuffed her hands in her pockets and shuffled up to the front door. An old habit had her checking the mailbox, but of course it was empty. They’d been having mail forwarded to Lorna’s house ever since Mary Beth had moved in with her.
    The key slid into the old lock and stuck in the same place it always had. She had to pull the doorknob toward her and hold it while she turned the key again. She pushed on the door and stepped inside, and immediately punched in the code to disarm the security system her mother had had installed six years ago. The foyer was dark, the afternoon sun having moved to the other side of the house, leaving the front in shadow. Lorna closed the door behind her and looked around.
    Virtually nothing had changed since Lorna’s childhood. Her grandmother’s upright piano still stood along the back wall of the living room, a faded shawl of burgundy velvet tossed over its top. The dining room furniture was the same her grandparents had purchased as a wedding gift to each other. The old oriental carpets were worn in spots, but the colors hadn’t faded too much over time. The china cupboard was bare—Mary Beth had packed up its contents and had insisted on taking everything with her to Lorna’s—china,