Free Cage of Love by V. C. Andrews Page A

takes care of me, too. It’s a partnership. I guess people would call us an old-fashioned family. So many young people are afraid of giving. They’re all so worried they won’t get enough in return and someone will be critical. In the end they’re not as happy,” she said.
    “I’ll never regret making you and your father my life’s work.”
    We lived on the farm Daddy had inherited, but it was a farm that hadn’t been worked for nearly twenty years. My grandfather Grayson Wagner once raised chickens for egg production. The long henhouses were still there, but now with their windows broken, their siding fading, the grass and weeds creeping all around and up the sides of the structures, they looked like ancient ruins. Once in a while Daddy would look out at them and vow to either tear them down or at least make them look neater. He never did either. I think tearing them down for him would have been too traumatic, too much like saying a final goodbye to the childhood he had enjoyed and to the memory of his father he cherished.
    We had a large house with thirteen rooms. Fifty or so years ago, families were made to fit such houses.
    People had three, four or five children without it being very unusual. After I was born, Mommy tried to have another child for two years and then, after seeing doctor after doctor, faced the fact that she might never have another. It might have been nature’s way, knowing that she would soon not be strong enough for more children and might even hasten the few years she had left to live. At least, that was something Daddy came to believe and told me after she had died.
    A month after she died, her beautiful canary, Lucky Lady, died. I woke up one morning and found her on her side in the cage, her beautiful voice silenced. When Daddy saw her, he actually sat on the sofa and wept. I put my arm around him and we pressed our heads together as we stared at the little yellow bird, both of us with our eyes full of Mommy, remembering how she would sit for hours and whistle and talk to her precious companion. We took her and buried her where Mommy was laid to rest.
    Loving creatures, I decided that day, could pine away, could simply give up when they no longer had their cherished companions.
    My thoughts then turned immediately to Daddy. Would I lose him soon, too? Would I be alone and have to go live with some relatives? Such terrifying thoughts as well as my love for Daddy and my sense of obligation, my responsibility to fulfill the role Mommy had filled so well, kept me tied closely to him, to his every breath, his every movement and need, which was soon to be seen as an obsession.
    It was the same for Daddy, too. He became even more of a homebody and warded off every attempt to get him to go out and mingle with people his own age. Of course, his friends used all the logic and even said things like “Jacqueline would want you to go on, Spencer. She wouldn’t want you getting yourself weak and sick from loneliness. You have a big responsibility now. You have to bring up your daughter all alone.”
    “I’m all right,” Daddy would insist. “We’re fine. Aren’t we, Magpie?”
    That was the nickname he had given me years and years ago, and it was what he called me more often than not, now that Mommy was gone.
    “Yes, Daddy,” I would say. “We’re fine.”
    “Fine,” my aunt Nadine, Daddy’s sister, would mutter. “The poor girl is missing out on a normal childhood, coming home from school every day to fix your supper and spending her weekends looking after your house. At least hire a woman.”
    “She’d be an employee, and it would all be work to her,” Daddy replied.
    “Well, what do you think it was for Jacqueline, you male chauvinist,” Aunt Nadine countered.
    “This house was her creation and everything in it was built and maintained with her hands of love,”
    Daddy replied in a storm of words, his eyes full of fury. “Don’t you think I would have hired a woman to help her