When the Wind Blows Read Free Page B

more than twenty years later, his love had mellowed to a mixture of sympathy and pity.
    “What’s Miss Edna doing?” he asked now.
    “She’s upstairs, in her room,” Diana replied. “If she needs anything, she’ll let me know.” Diana’s even features were momentarily warped by a strange grin that seemed to Bill to be based more on fear than on amusement. “She pounds the floor with her cane.”
    Charming, Bill thought, knowing he wouldn’t be able to keep the sarcasm from his voice if he spoke the word aloud. Diana’s grin faded to a wan smile.
    “I’ve gotten used to it over the years.” A thought occurred to her: “I hope it won’t frighten Christie.”
    Bill lit his pipe and waved away the cloud of smoke that rose from the bowl. “She’s likely to be afraid of everything for a while, Diana. Losing both parents at her age can damage a child. You might be letting yourself in for more than you can handle. She’s probably going to have nightmares, and she’s likely to be demanding. She’s going to need a lot of attention.”
    “She’ll get it,” Diana said. She paused for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice had a strength in it that Bill had never heard before.
    “I want to take care of her, Bill,” she said. “I’ve been taken care of long enough. It’s time I stopped being my mother’s dutiful daughter and had a child of my own. And maybe I can talk Mother into having Esperanza help out a little more.” She eased Christie’s head off her lap and stood up, and Bill, realizing that she wanted him to go, stood up, too.
    “If you need me, call me,” he said.
    Diana touched his arm and nodded. “I will. But I don’t think I’ll need anything. I think I’ll be just fine.”
    As she walked Bill to the door, Esperanza appeared from the kitchen, nodded briefly to them, and moved on into the living room. Diana stood at the front door until Bill had driven away, then she, too, returned to the living room. Esperanza was kneeling in front of the couch, stroking Christie’s forehead.
    “What are you doing?” Diana asked. Esperanza looked up at her, her brown eyes sad.
    “She is dying,” Esperanza said quietly.
    Diana felt a surge of panic. “Dying? What are you talking about?”
    The Mexican woman shook her head sadly. “Not now. But soon. The children will call her, and she will have to go.”
    “Stop it, Esperanza,” Diana told her. “Don’t say another word.”
    “But it is true, Miss Diana. You know it is true, no?”
    As their eyes met, and Diana saw the great sadness in Esperanza’s face, she felt a chill.
    The same chill she had felt that morning when the wind began to blow.

2

    From her front room on the second floor of the house, Edna Amber watched Bill Henry drive away. Her body rigid, she leaned on her cane, held firmly in both her hands, but as the doctor’s old Rambler station wagon disappeared in a cloud of red dust, she let herself relax. Her ears, as sharp in old age as they had been when she was fifty years younger, listened to the sounds of the house. For the moment there was silence.
    She liked the silence, for it meant that the wind was not blowing. The thing Edna Amber hated most about Amberton was the wind.
    Amos Amber, twenty years older than she and used to the wind after his years in Amberton, had assured her that she would get used to it, that the only wind that was really bothersome was the chinook, the warm wind that came whistling out of the Rockies several times each winter, raising the temperature, melting the snow, and setting people’s nerves on edge. She had not gotten used to it, not gotten used to it at all.
    Instead, as the years had passed, she had learned to steel herself against the wind, learned to watch the sky and the mountains to the west, learned to watch for the signs that the wind was coming. Watchfulness had not been enough.
    The day Diana was born, the wind had blown.
    Ever since that day, she had hated the wind,