The Reading Lessons Read Free Page A

to Flavia or Lemon who did the laundry, but she did sometimes speak to Hadley. Once, she asked him to clean dust off her shoes while they were still on her feet. Another time, she got her hat strings knotted in her hair, and Hadley had to unknot them for her. 
    “Mind you, I’d never let you touch me if it weren’t the strictest of emergencies,” she told him as he worked to free the hat. 
    Later, when Hadley attempted to explain to Loomis what a rich girl’s hair felt like (a thousand paper cuts burning up your hands), Loomis informed Hadley that he didn’t have a lick of horse sense. 
    “You want too much,” Loomis said. “Even her stupid hair hurts you.”
    Hadley didn’t get miffed like he did when Loomis called him Crumpette, on account of his small size, or when he gave Hadley a head-butt for eating the last Jelly Jumble. He understood that Loomis was jealous over the fact that sometimes Hadley wasn’t the same forgotten shadow all the other servants seemed to be. On those rare occasions when Hadley stepped into the full light of day, a yearning inside him burned worse than a million paper cuts. 
    Why shouldn’t Lucinda Browning be in love with him? Sure, his skin was black, but wasn’t it white, too? Hadley came from a long line of folks who didn’t mind coloreds. And yes, he worked for Lucinda’s daddy. And yes, he was the son of a cook. But he was the son of a Heart-of-the-World salesmen, too. Anyway, he was beginning to think that Lucinda didn’t mind coloreds so long as they had a little extra something mixed in. When he was untangling her hat strings, she’d stood so close, a blonde hair hopped off her head and found a new home on his sleeve. That night, he’d laid his shirt across the foot of his bed and left it there untouched for a week so as to delay losing that small piece of her. Lucinda never stood close enough to drop hair on Loomis Sackett. She would never have even asked Loomis to untangle her in the first place, because Lucinda Browning didn’t know Loomis Sackett was alive. He was just a chair.
    “I bet you don’t know what the ‘m’ stands for in those curly letters she always wears on her clothes,” Loomis said to Hadley one day. 
    “Do you?” Hadley asked.
    “Shoot no. I’m just a servant, same as you.”
    The fact that Lucinda’s third initial was information denied to them, made that little “m” seem as delicious to Hadley as a pair of girl bloomers. 
    “I’m gonna find out,” Hadley told Loomis. “Just you watch and see. Someday I’m gonna know all about her ‘m.’” 
    If Hadley had possessed the wisdom to tell his mama about these new paper-cut-sharp yearnings of his, Mama would have said that paper-cut-sharp yearnings were the handiwork of the devil. Because it happened that Mama was the finest proverb-quoter in the state of Mississippi, she would have said something like: The shrewd man perceives evil and hides, while simpletons continue on and suffer the penalty. 
    Mama collected proverbs like she collected Hadley’s baby teeth, with a flawless memory for where each one had come from, and what had grown up in its place. 
    But Hadley didn’t tell Mama about his yearnings, and the handiwork of the devil was just too sweet to resist. 
    Could be it was Bath Day that ruined him. There wasn’t a soul in Browning House that wasn’t cranky and full of dread on Wednesdays when Lucinda took her bath. The worst of tantrums were thrown on Wednesdays. No matter how hard everyone tried, Lucinda’s bath water was never quite hot enough. Gaynell, the Upstairs Girl, had her eye blackened one week by a flying bar of Lifebuoy, and Hadley had to be hoisted up on the shoulders of big brown LeJeune in order to retrieve the bath brush that sailed atop a light fixture one grim Wednesday in November. Loomis had a theory that Lucinda Browning was so ice cold that she could chill scalding water with the stir of her toe. 
    Because of these tantrums, there was a