Morning Read Free Page A

sun slanted in through the high loft door, the dust motes drifted down onto that straw and onto the backs of my cows like more gold, golden coins; you could almost hear it chiming as it fell.
All animals, if loved personally and often, respond. So it came to be that every evening when I went out to the barnyard to call the cows home from the pasture, clanking the bucket of grain against the great round metal water trough and making triumphant gonglike dinner-bell sounds ring out, those five cows came running in from wherever they were. Really running. Father said he’d never seen anything like it. My brother, who was sometimes home from college, talked to us about Pavlov and stimulus-response. Whatever it was, when I called my cows in the evening, they came, knowing they would get a nice big helping of sweet ground corn and part of a bale of hay. Later, when they had been bred and were big with their calves, I would laugh to see them come running up, their enormous bellies swaying above their slender legs. It was as if all the maiden ladies at our church had suddenly run out together into the street, their flowered pillbox hats bobbing, their pocketbooks and huge corseted bosoms and hips and stomachs swinging gently above their tapered ankles and dainty tiny feet. My shy-eyed cows did have that air of refinement about them.
    Sara picked up the next manuscript sheet. Seraphina was there, twisting and writhing, her bosom heaving under delicate lace. Errol had left her shut in the turret.
    Sara looked back at the page she had just read. How had this realistic little memoir about cows get into the middle of the romance novel? Had Heartways House mixed up two manuscripts? But what would Heartways House, which published only romance novels and a few spy and adventure stories, be doing with a realistic piece? Perhaps one of the editors was reading it for a friend.
    Sara set the page about the cows aside. She’d rather read about that than old Errol and Seraphina, she thought. Seraphina , really, what a hokey name.
    Before she read on, she treated herself to another trip to the bathroom. Her heartleapt: still no blood.
    That evening, her work done, Sara stood in the bedroom, looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on the closet door. She had pulled up her newest pair of jeans—size fourteen. My God, she had never worn size fourteen before in her life, she was getting to be an absolute whale . And today the jeans would not quite fit. They were too big and loose on her legs, but she could not zip them up around her stomach and waist.
    Despair beckoned. All day long she had hoped, but this was one of the unmistakable signs that her period was about to start—this swollen stomach that bulged out in front of her like a mock pregnancy. In a few days, after she had gone through the heaviest flow, her emptied body would suddenly slip back into shape, her stomach would tighten, all of its own accord, and she would look normal again, if not terribly slim, at least not bloated. But for now, she was stuck with the silhouette of a kangaroo. Still—her period hadn’t started.…
    Bending over to tug off her jeans, she smiled at her tummy. “Hi,” she said. “Anybody home?” Then, optimistic, she dressed in a long denim skirt and several bright baggy shirts, grateful that the layered look was in. She pulled on knee-high red boots, brushed her hair up and out, and put on dangling earrings that her mother would have scorned as being fit only for Gypsies. Throwing on her red wool cape, she went out into the evening, to walk to the Atlantic Café to meet her husband.
    It was not quite five o’clock, not yet dark. This was a mild November so far, and the air was gentle, the wind low. One of the pleasures of living on Nantucket was that one could walk to almost any spot in the village, along streets that were as charming as a dream. Pleasant Street curved before her like a scene from a European fairy tale, brick mansions with