Free The Blue Bottle Club by Penelope Stokes

black shoes, and socks. She picked up the gold cuff links from the dresser, but after a second thought dropped them into her pocket and rummaged in the top drawer for some ordinary bone ones. There was no telling what might happen next; she and her mother might need the gold in those cuff buttons.
    At the thought of pawning Daddy's gold cuff links, a rage rose up in Letitia that threatened to overwhelm her. How could he do this to them? Make his escape and leave them alone with nothing, not even a house to live in?
    She wanted to scream at him, to shake her fist in his face and demand an explanation. But when she tried to conjure up the memory of her father, all she could see was the limp rag doll hanging from the rafters over her head. The blue, distorted countenance, attached to the neck by a wide red rope burn.
    Daddy was gone. Only The Body remained. And the memory of The Body would be with her, she was grimly certain, until the day she died.

8
    WORKING WOMEN
    March 1, 1930
    F or two full months Letitia felt as if she had been drowning, fighting frantically to heave herself to the surface and pull a deep breath into her aching lungs. But the sheer effort of going on with life weighed at her limbs and dragged her down. She slogged through the days in slow motion, reluctantly helping her mother pack the few possessions they hadn't sold, sort through her father's things and dispose of them, and move, at last, to a tiny cottage on the other end of Montford Avenue—a converted carriage house with two small bedrooms and a postage-stamp garden.
    Then she awoke one morning to find everything changed.
    For one thing, her mother wasn't crying. Instead, she sat at the little kitchen table looking out over the fallow garden, jotting notes on the back of an envelope.
    Tish watched from the doorway for a few minutes and then said, "Mother?"
    Her mother glanced up and smiled—really smiled. "Good morning, darling! Wonderful day, isn't it?" She gestured out the window to the sundrenched plot of ground. "Look—it's almost spring."
    Tish looked, but all she could see were high weeds, dried and brown, left over from last year's planting. "Look at what?"
    "See, over there in the corner next to the wall—crocuses. Yellow and purple crocuses."
    Now that her mother had pointed them out, Tish could discern a flash of color low to the ground amid the weeds. A surge of hope rose in her heart, that breath of air she had been struggling to find since January. But her mothers smile had more to do with it than the blossoming crocuses.
    Tish poured herself a cup of coffee and sat across from her mother at the table. "What are you doing?"
    "Figuring." Mother raised an eyebrow "Coffee?"
    Tish shrugged. "I'm getting used to it. You okay?"
    "I'm fine, honey. But we need to talk, if you're awake enough."
    "I'm awake."
    "All right. Now—" She turned the envelope so that Tish could see the columns of figures listed on it. "Here's what we've got, from the sale of the furniture and the little bit of money we had left after your daddy's funeral expenses."
    Tish felt her chest tighten, and she turned away. "Mother, I don't think this is the time to—"
    "Yes, it is the time," Mother said firmly. "According to my figures, we have enough to rent this house for almost a year."
    "A year!" Tish thought wistfully of her huge, bright bedroom in Cameron House, with its fireplace and canopied double bed. Here she had a room no bigger than a closet, with a narrow single bed, a small chest of drawers, and a tiny window. She couldn't live here permanently; she'd die of sheer claustrophobia. "Surely you don't intend to stay here for a year?"
    "I intend to stay here forever, if need be."
    "Mother, you can't mean it. We're in the servants' quarters, for heaven's sake! We've barely got room to breathe."
    Tish's mother cleared her throat and shifted in her chair. "We have plenty of room, Letitia. The parlor is spacious enough, and what do we need bedrooms