Poison to Purge Melancholy Read Free

instead? I was battling the afternoon traffic on I-64, which was so crowded you couldn’t fit a riding mower in the spaces between cars. The sky was that shade of monotonous gray that makes bare tree limbs look the most bleak. Since the temperature was ten degrees above freezing, no pretty Christmas snow would come from those clouds—they existed solely to depress me. Worst of all, my destination was Williamsburg and the home of Gladys Lee, mother of the man I’d been seeing the last eight months.
    Seeing? What an understatement. I was, after all, a Montella. Other people have “relationships.” Montellas simply rip out their own hearts and give them away. Hugh, as far as my gut was concerned, was It—Mr. Right, Soulmate Central. Why else would I be mentally cursing him out right now?
    Not that I minded meeting Hugh’s family this weekend. I wanted to. Really. But no woman in her sane mind approaches this kind of first contact without her man at her side, right? Better yet, in front of her.
    Sure, I understood that Hugh had to put in a full day at the post office—he was a mailman, after all, and up to his well-developed abs in late greeting cards and presents. And no, I hadn’t minded driving Miss Maggie to Richmond. Even if I had, I couldn’t say no to her.
    Nearly eight months ago, Magnolia Shelby had brought me to Virginia because she had decided I should inherit her estate, Bell Run. The whole “why” of that decision would fill a book, so I won’t go into it here. Anyway, since I came to Bell Run to live with her, Miss Maggie has become not only my benefactor, but my mentor, housemate, and best friend (I reserved a ventricle for her before handing the rest of my heart over to Hugh). She was pushing ninety-two, and no longer drove a car, so I’d also become her chauffeur. Every Wednesday, I drove her to Richmond to visit her son Frank, who was a psychiatric patient at the VA Hospital. Frank wasn’t all that comfortable around me yet, so my routine was to stop in, say hello, then go fill a couple of hours reading in the car or shopping.
    Today, though, was Miss Maggie’s Christmas visit—she’d stay with her son all afternoon. It was too cold to sit in the car, and shopping on the day before Christmas was my idea of self-inflicted torture. Still, I could have found some way to while away the hours. But no, Hugh had come up with a Brilliant Solution. I would drive Miss Maggie to Richmond, taking Hugh’s fourteen-year-old daughter Beth Ann with me. I would then drive on to Williamsburg so that Beth Ann could arrive early to help her grandmother with holiday preparations.
    Translation: he wanted his moody kid out of his hair for the day.
    Hugh would then stop for Miss Maggie on his way down to Williamsburg. She was a family friend of the Lees—practically a surrogate grandmother. Four of the five siblings had been her students back when she taught junior high history. As a teenager, Hugh had come out to Bell Run to do chores for Miss Maggie. After his wife died, and Hugh decided to leave Richmond and all memories of her behind, Miss Maggie helped him get a job at her new post office annex. When Hugh brought Beth Ann—then a toddler—to live in the postal service trailer at Bell Run, Miss Maggie started spending holidays with the Lee family.
    So here I was, me and a teenager who’d said nothing since I picked her up this morning except “cheeseburger combo” when we stopped for lunch. The air in my Neon had been replaced with her sulkiness. I couldn’t take a breath without being aware of every one of the injustices she felt had been done to her in the last month, all of them somehow my fault.
    That wasn’t just my normal Italian guilt kicking in. Familiarity does breed contempt. The more familiar I got with her father, the more contemptible I became in Beth Ann’s eyes. I was okay as a neighbor—she’d even liked me for a few months—but she wanted nothing to do with me as a potential