Michael Malone - Weebly

adventure. She had dreamed of herself at sunrise
flinging armfuls of roses out of an airplane down on
ancient Delos in the blue Mediterranean sea.
Pru had never thought life would be cruel to her,
would send a telegram to say a German grenade had
killed her older brother, whose games and books, half a
century old, still sat on the shelves in his bedroom
upstairs. She had never meant for her mother to die so
slowly and with such embittered complaint that pity died
before she did. Never meant for her father to lose
everything they had in 1929 so that she was called
home from London before she had crossed the Channel
for the first time. Called home to supervise his funeral
after he blew a ragged hole through his head. She had
not planned to watch helplessly as her own life lived
itself out here in Dingley Falls, where all her father had
left her (after the wealth had disappeared—like her
father, her mother, and brother), all he had left her was
the house on Cromwell Hill Road and the little building
on the green which she had made into the Tea Shoppe
in order to pay its taxes.
All the rest was gone somewhere, or nowhere,