While We're Far Apart Read Free

her once she gets used to the idea.”
    “Daddy?” Esther spoke louder this time.
    “And I know you’d still help Ma out anytime she needed it, wouldn’t you? Like if she needed a break?”
    “Of course. We’ll manage just fine. You’ll see.”
    Panic squeezed Esther’s ribs. This arrangement was really going to happen, and she didn’t know how to stop it. She didn’t want Daddy to go away – and she certainly didn’t want boring Penny Goodrich to move in with them and take Mama’s place. “Daddy!”
    “Yes, doll?” He answered absently, gazing out at the tiny yard, not at her. He took her hand in his and gently caressed it with his thumb, but she knew he wasn’t really listening to her. It was as if he were already on board a ship with Uncle Joe or Uncle Steve, sailing miles and miles away.
    Esther hesitated to speak her mind, afraid that if she said what she really wanted to say, Daddy would get mad and let go of her hand. And she didn’t want to do anything to make him let go.
    “Never mind,” she mumbled.
    Because that was the mistake she had made with Mama. Esther had let go of her hand, thinking she was much too grown-up to hold hands. And now she would never hold Mama’s hand again.

C HAPTER 2
    P ENNY G OODRICH KNEW she had just been given a second chance. Eddie Shaffer’s wife had died more than a year ago, and that was a terrible tragedy. But now he needed another wife and a mother for his two children, and Penny wanted the job. Eddie would fall in love with her this time. She would make sure of it.
    Penny couldn’t remember a time in her life when she hadn’t been in love with the tall, golden-haired boy next door. Even as a little girl, she had watched him playing baseball in the street with his brothers, and she had loved him. She had wished she could join in those games and hit home runs for him so he would love her in return, but her mother wouldn’t allow it. “You’re too clumsy, Penny. You can’t play with those big kids. You’ll get hurt. Besides, they don’t want someone like you on their team.”
    On warm summer evenings, Eddie and the other kids would play hide-and-seek or kick the can, and Penny would watch from her front stoop. His blond hair would look yellowish-green beneath the streetlight and he would shout, “Here I come, ready or not,” before dashing off to search for the others. She longed to hide in the bushes like the other kids and squeal with excitement when Eddie finally found her. But Mother said it was too dangerous for someone like her to run around after dark. “You never know who could be hiding in the bushes, waiting to grab you. The world is filled with bad people, whether you have sense enough to realize it or not.”
    When she was finally old enough to go to school, Penny wanted to tag along behind Eddie and his brothers as they shuffled through the autumn leaves or tromped through the mounds of snow that the plows left behind, but Penny’s mother always walked to school with her instead. “You wouldn’t know enough to pay attention to the traffic. You have no sense at all. You would get run over by a car the first time you tried to cross the street.”
    Penny wasn’t allowed to go to Eddie’s ball games in high school and watch him play, because she wasn’t like the other girls. Penny’s parents were older than everyone else’s parents, and her sister, Hazel, who was seventeen years older, had left home before Penny was old enough to remember her. Penny would sometimes watch Eddie from a distance, and if he dropped a piece of paper or a gum wrapper she would pick it up and put it in the shoebox she kept in her closet. She used to write his name in her notebook while daydreaming in class, filling page after page with I love Eddie and Eddie and Penny with little hearts drawn around their names.
    Penny remembered crying her eyes out when Mrs. Shaffer told her that Eddie was getting married. She and her parents had been invited to his wedding