She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,2

warm for such a coat. This didn’t seem to bother her. She had it buttoned to her neck. As I came over the hill, the woman turned toward me, her eyes black, hawklike. Her hair, as white as her coat, fluttered in the light wind. She became rigid at the sight of me, her shoulders squaring off. Her hands balled into fists and disappeared beneath the folds of her coat. She held there a moment, eyes upon me, cautious and strange, then returned her gaze to the girl on the bench.

The girl wore a white ruffled blouse, also buttoned up, tucked neatly into a black skirt falling just past her knees. Her long brown hair, alive with waves and curls, dropped over her shoulders and down her back. One side partially covered her face, the other pinned back behind her ear. Her dark eyes were lost between the pages of a paperback book held in her lap with gloved hands.

I’m not sure how long I stood there.

I’m not sure why I stood there.

But I did, I stood there watching her, watching her turn the pages with a gentle determination, her lips slightly parted, mouthing the words silently to an enthralled audience of one.

“Jessie’s Girl” blurted out from my radio and the girl’s head jerked up, her eyes on me, one hand carefully marking her place in the book.

I fumbled with the radio’s knobs and turned it down.

I didn’t remember walking up to the bench, but somehow I had. I stood right beside it.

The girl’s brow furrowed, and she tilted her head curiously. “My, you are an ugly little boy.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I said nothing at all. I knew I wasn’t ugly. Auntie Jo said I was lucky that I took after Momma in the looks department rather than being cursed to look like Daddy. Although, I had a picture of Daddy, the only one I managed to hide from Auntie Jo. He looked like a movie star standing next to his rusty Ford, the same one he had been driving when—

“Your clothes are ratty, too.” She had an odd accent, sounding something like James Bond but not quite.

A squeal came from the radio’s speaker, drowning out Rick Springfield and all else. I switched it off, retracted the antenna, and found myself climbing onto the bench, sitting on the opposite end from her. Again, I didn’t know why. My mind screamed for me to run away. This was a girl, after all. I had no business with girls, especially one like this, all prissy and proper and smelling of flowers. But I didn’t run. I climbed right up on that bench and sat beside her, ignoring the strange flutter in my stomach.

I nodded up at the woman standing at the SUV. “Is that your momma?”

“No, not my mother.”

“They why is she watching you?”

“That’s what she does.”

“It’s kinda creepy.”

The girl smiled at this, then forced it back as if she didn’t want me to see her smile, as if it were something she didn’t give away so freely. “What kind of boy wanders around a cemetery all alone? Where are your parents?”

“Dead.”

“Really? Who killed them?”

Not what killed them or how did they die, but who killed them. As if death by another’s hand was the most logical of things.

“What are you reading?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. I didn’t want to talk about Momma and Daddy, not now. There had been enough of that today.

She held up the book so I could see the cover—Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The paperback’s spine was nearly white with creases, opened and closed so many times the color was gone, faded and cracked away. The cover wasn’t much better. The book looked a thousand years old, some lost thing rescued from the bottom of a box in someone’s basement.

“Is that the one with the boy and the raft?”

“Hmm. Ugly and uneducated, I see.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re thinking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That book isn’t even written by Dickens. Twain wrote it. Twain is a hack. Twain isn’t even his real name. He was just a boat captain who managed to scribble out a few thoughts when he wasn’t gambling and drinking.”

I hadn’t read anything by Twain or Dickens. My reading shelf consisted of half the titles from the Hardy Boys collection and a few dozen comics. I didn’t know anyone who read Twain or Dickens, not even my parents or Auntie Jo. “What