The Secret Gift Read Free

a piece of music. E-mail is nothing more than fast-food correspondence. A takeaway window sort of way to dash off a few lines, using as few words as possible and even fewer thoughts. It’s detached. It’s impersonal.”
    She had been so very, very right.
    It was dark when Libby finally got up from the rocking chair and walked the length of the wraparound porch to the screen door. She closed her fingers around the latch and found a small sense of comfort in its familiar, strident creak as she opened the door and headed inside. She went to the kitchen to make a pot of tea, taking the time to use loose leaves like her mother always had, not her usual quickly steeped muslin bag of whatever happened to be handy. She chose her mother’s favorite tin from the tea rack, a blend that she had sent to her from London each month, and even heated the Brown Betty pot with a dash of boiling water before adding the leaves and filling the pot to steep, just as her mother had taught her.
    Libby opened the cupboard and started to reach for her favorite mug, a clunky oversized thing emblazoned with an image of the Statue of Liberty. She had sent the mug as a gift to her mother shortly after she’d moved to New York, but Matilde had never used it and it had become Libby’s mug whenever she visited. This time, however, her fingers fell short of it, and Libby reached underneath it instead to one of the dainty porcelain cups and saucers painted with bright flowers that her mother had always insisted upon using for tea.
    Libby gave in to a smile as she splashed the steaming orangey-brown brew into the cup, remembering how she used to heckle her mother about the cups whenever they would have tea.
    “Teacups like this are for decoration, Mother. Or collecting. They should be on display on a shelf, not used for drinking. They hardly hold more than a sip.”
    Matilde had simply shaken her head, her eyes lifting heavenward behind the round lenses of her reading glasses. “ ’Tis a far sight more proper than that basin of a thing you insist upon drinking from.”
    Setting the saucer and cup, and its matching pot, on a tray, Libby walked carefully up the curving stairwell to her bedroom. She stopped before opening the door, and after a moment’s hesitation, continued down the hall until she had reached the door to her mother’s bedroom.
    Libby had only to nudge the panel with her knee and it swung easily over the polished hardwood floor. She stood for a moment in the doorway, staring at the room that was awash with the moonlight coming in through tall, gossamer-curtained windows.
    Her mother’s lilac scent wafted over her, welcoming her. How many times had Libby spent the night in that tall four-poster bed with its pristine white linen duvet that felt just like a cloud when you slipped underneath it? On stormy summer nights, and sometimes in winter with the fire glowing in the bedroom grate, she had come tiptoeing inside, more often after her father had died when she had been just seven. They would sit together, Matilde and Libby, and Matilde would brush out Libby’s dark hair, back when it had been long and straight and pulled back in its usual ponytail.
    It was after she had moved to New York that Libby had had it cut to her shoulders—a city-girl hairstyle for a city-girl life. But instead of sleek and fashionable, Libby’s life was more suited to alligator clips with pencils stuck in at odd angles. She kept her hair styled simply, parted on the side and tucked behind her ear in a manner that had it flipping up under her chin whenever she was bent over the pages of a book.
    The tea set clinked softly as Libby crossed the room. She set the tray on the folded coverlet that stretched across the foot of the bed. It was a high bed, made all the more so by the thick feather-filled pillowtop that layered the mattress. Libby used the small bed step and sank slowly into the down-filled covering. She lay there for several quiet moments, letting the