The Preacher Read Free Page B

girl, that she had carefully preserved and sorted every day for the past twenty years. She knew that the girl was still there somewhere beneath all the layers of fat. Through the photos she could keep the girl alive, even though she was slipping further and further away with each passing year.
    With a last look over his shoulder, Stefan left his mother sitting in the kitchen and followed Robert out the door. As Robert said, they had business to take care of.

    Erica considered going out for a walk, but realized that it probably wasn’t such a good idea right now, with the sun at its peak and the heat most intense. She’d done splendidly throughout her entire pregnancy until the heat wave set in. Since then, she went about like a sweaty whale, desperately trying to find a way to cool off. Patrik, God bless him, had come up with the idea of buying her a table fan, and now she carried it about with her like a treasure wherever she went in the house. The only drawback was that she had to plug it in, so she could never sit further from an outlet than the cord would reach, which limited her choices.
    But on the veranda the outlet was perfectly placed, and she could settle down on the sofa with the fan on the table in front of her. No position was comfortable for more than five minutes, which made her keep shifting to find a better position. Sometimes she felt a foot kicking at her ribs, or else something that felt like a hand punching her in the side. Then she was forced to change position again. She had no idea how she was going to stand another month of this.
    She and Patrik had only been together for half a year when she got pregnant, but oddly enough it hadn’t upset either of them. They were both a little older, a little more certain of what they wanted, and they didn’t think there was any reason to wait. Only now was she starting to get cold feet, at the eleventh hour, so to speak. Perhaps they’d not shared enough everyday life before they embarked upon this pregnancy. What would happen to their relationship when they were suddenly presented with a tiny stranger who required all the attention they’d been able to devote to each other before?
    The crazy, blind infatuation of their early days together had faded, of course. They had a more realistic, everyday foundation to build on now, with better insight into each other’s good and bad sides. But after the baby was born, what if only the bad sides were left? How many times had she heard the statistics about all the relationships that fizzled out during the first year of a baby’s life? Well, there was no use worrying about it now. What’s done is done, and there was no getting around the fact that both she and Patrik were longing for the arrival of this child with every fibre of their bodies. She hoped that sense of longing would be enough to get them through the turbulent changes ahead.
    Erica gave a start when the telephone rang. Laboriously she struggled to get up from the sofa, hoping that whoever was calling had enough patience not to hang up.
    ‘Yes, hello? … Oh, hi, Conny … Oh, I’m fine, thanks, it’s just a little too hot to be fat… Drop by? Sure, of course … Come on over for coffee… Spend the night? Well …’ Erica sighed inside. ‘Of course, why not? When are you coming? Tonight? Well no, it’s no problem at all. You can sleep in the guest room.’
    Wearily she hung up the receiver. There was one big drawback to having a house in Fjällbacka in the summertime. All sorts of relatives and friends – who hadn’t uttered a peep during the ten colder months of the year – would pop up out of the blue. They weren’t particularly interested in seeing her in November, but in July they saw their chance to live rent-free with an ocean view. Erica had thought that they might be spared this year, when half of July passed without a word from anyone. But now her cousin Conny said he was on his way to Fjällbacka from Trollhättan with his wife and