Sweet Jiminy Read Free Page B

inscription on the first page confirmed this.
    Henry Esau Hunt—Recollections and Resolutions
    Her grandfather’s name, her grandfather’s writing. Her grandfather’s diary? Jiminy thumbed through the roughly bound pages. The handwriting was very precise, but faded and difficult to read. The first entry was dated January 1, 1954, and titled “Our Wedding Day.”
    It contained a brief description of the event, really just a record of the fact that Henry Esau Hunt had married Willa Calamity Peal in the presence of their parents and a minister at noon on that New Year’s Day. The entry seemed dispassionate enough, though Jiminy supposed it had meant enough to Henry to warrant beginning this book.
    From that day forward, it appeared that Henry had made an entry every six months or so, only to record a happening deemed significant. As the years wore on, he began adding slightly to the entries—just bare-boned commentary that hinted at what he might have been feeling at the time. On January 6, 1959, Henry noted that Margaret Peal Hunt was born at eight thirty-five in the morning. Henry had written: “A long, hard night. A joyous day.” Jiminy smiled ruefully, reflecting that her mother continued to be known for such extremes.
    She flipped to the last entry, which occurred about two-thirds of the way through the book, with plenty of blank pages left to be filled. It was dated January 1, 1967, and it read: “Hard year, hopeless. Poor Lyn, poor us.” And then, nothing more.
    Jiminy knew that her grandfather had died suddenly and unexpectedly when her mother was eight years old. She was less certain that he’d been killed by a lost tribe of Indians hiding in the surrounding hills, or a roving band of land pirates, or a swarm of killer vampire bats up from the Louisiana swamps. All of these explanations had been offered to Jiminy by her mother, with considerable flourishes, but Jiminy had instead accepted a cousin’s report that her mother’s father had succumbed to a massive, sudden pulmonary embolism, and died very prematurely at the age of thirty-two, leaving his wife and daughter to fend for themselves as best they could.
    Since Jiminy’s mother had been born in 1959, she would have turned eight years old in 1967, the year of Henry’s final entry. It seemed he’d died before he could make another one. Had the hardness and hopelessness he’d written about brought on the embolism? Was that just a medical term for an unfixable broken heart?
    Poor Lyn, poor us. Jiminy assumed the Lyn he referred to was the Lyn she knew. The Lyn who had worked for her grandmother for over fifty years, and in whose indifferent disregard Jiminy had always found a special solace. The most anyone could hope for from Lyn was a gruff affection that could be easily mistaken for dislike. Still, Jiminy had always gravitated toward her, because as shy as Jiminy was, there was something about Lyn that drew her out. Now that she thought about it, Jiminy felt an intense gratitude for Lyn that she’d never adequately expressed. Why hadn’t she? She decided she would. That was something she could do.
    Poor Lyn, poor us. What had happened to Lyn? What had happened to all of them?
    Jiminy moved backwards through the pages, looking for answers. Her hand paused on an entry that read: “Edward and Jiminy found, buried. Awful.”
    For a moment, she felt like she couldn’t breathe, like she’d stumbled across a hidden portal into the future and was illicitly reading about her own demise. She’d been found and buried, but how had she died? She shivered. The date of the entry was June 24, 1966. There had obviously been another Jiminy. She’d never in her entire life heard of her, not even in her mother’s crazier stories. Who was she?
    â€œScarin’ up the devil in here?”
    Jiminy leapt up, slamming the book shut as she whirled around in surprise. Lyn was