The Widows of Wichita County Read Free

they might have passed the time of day, but Anna was from Europe and, for most of them, that might as well be the moon.
    Anna gripped the three letters from Italy lying beside her. The first year she had come to Texas as a bride, she found several letters from her family unopened and crushed in the floorboards of the ranch trucks. Unsure of what to say to her husband, she solved the problem by getting a post office box. Whenever she made a trip to town she stopped by, knowing her letters would be waiting. If her husband Davis noticed, he never commented.
    That small inconsiderate act made her think about leaving him and going back home where she knew she belonged. But she hesitated with indecision in the same halting way that she stuttered in speech. No action was less frightening than action. It seemed every time she acted on impulse or emotion, she had chosen the wrong path. She always had to remind herself to think before she acted, just as she had to think before she spoke. It was her bad luck that her husband was a man deeply involved in his own agenda and who had little time or interest in her problems.
    If she had told her family about her thoughts of leaving Davis because he did not deliver her mail, they wouldhave said she was a pampered fool. They would have suggested she stay and grow to love him while learning to overlook his flaws. After five years, Anna sometimes felt as if all her energy had been spent on swimming through the rocky shoals of her marriage. If she did not act, and soon, it would be only a matter of time before she drowned.
    Driving past the five buildings that framed the college grounds, Anna took a deep breath and tried to convince herself one more time that everything was all right. She was letting her thoughts run away with her. But she was no longer the schoolgirl Davis brought home to Clifton Creek.
    This part of town always welcomed her with its large trees and neatly trimmed grounds. Davis had told her the locals started the college when one of Clifton Creek’s first settlers donated his huge home. For years the entire teachers college had operated out of the one building. Dorms, a gym, other classrooms designed in the same aging brick structure, had grown up around the old home.
    Anna thought the campus was the only place for miles that anyone might call pretty. She would like to put the area on canvas, a view peeping through the colors of fall to the hundred-year-old home that must have been a mansion in its time.
    She slowed. Maybe she would paint it in the violets of sunset, if she could catch the twilight just right. Here, its beauty tiptoed quickly, never overwhelming as it had back home. She would have to work hard to catch the uniqueness of the mansion on canvas.
    As Anna passed, a few students hurried from their cars to their early classes, paying little more attention to the traffic than the squirrels did. She noticed a long-legged woman dressed in Western clothes crawl out of a Dumpster with a box in each hand.
    Anna did not need to hear the woman’s words. The look of someone swearing was the same in any language. Anna turned away, not wanting to be a part of another’s troubles.
    * * *
    â€œDamn, damn and double damn,” Randi Howard mumbled as she tossed the boxes in the back of her Jeep. She’d fought like a warrior inside that Dumpster to claim the boxes and both of them smelled like cheap whiskey and hot sauce.
    Any clothes she packed in them would reek of the same, but at least she would be seeing this town in her rearview mirror. She thought briefly of packing all her junk in trash bags, but somehow boxes seemed more dignified. She should have invested in some of those fine packing boxes sold by moving companies. As many times as she had moved over the years, she would have worn the boxes out.
    Randi climbed into her Jeep and headed back to the trailer park. The sky clouded up as if it might rain, but she planned to be long gone before she got caught