Free The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood

second.
    . . .
    The beginning? Well, I was glad to be back home from the midway, despite everything. I was obviously with child. Maud-Lucy came back from Granyard to take care of me.
    . . .
    Oh, but she
jilted
her ailing auntie. For
me.
Papa’s English had improved somewhat over the years, but his written communication was a fright. Mama’s even worse. Such spelling you simply would not believe. I never saw the letter, but Maud-Lucy got the idea I was half dead from consumption. Imagine her shock to find me perfectly hale and big as a pumpkin.
    . . .
    Oh, but I was! It takes a little imagination, but I was a round and vigorous girl.
    . . .
    You certainly
do
have a good imagination. Who’s the one who imagined my decrepit old self as a record breaker?
    . . .
    There you go. Anyway. Maud-Lucy took immediate charge of my confinement, reading to me in her third-floor parlor while I ate tinned marshmallows and kept my feet up. She played piano and sang to me and read out loud a very long novel by Mr. Charles Dickens.
    . . .
    Bleak House.
It took her days to read that book. I was so happy. It’s possible that my circumstances—being coddled by the woman I loved most in the world—misled me into believing that time could be peeled back. You’re too young to know how alluring a notion that might be. I kept forgetting that a baby was en route. But when my time came, oh, what a string of surprises.
    . . .
    One, Maud-Lucy Stokes was bone useless: boo-hooing start to finish, her hands rubbed raw from wringing. Mama fed me whiskey in a porcelain egg cup bordered with hand-painted ivy leaves. Something else from the motherland that I’d never seen. “
Sha, sha, sha,
” she kept saying. “
Sha, sha, sha.
”
    . . .
    I have no idea, though I took it for comfort. Maud-Lucy was just a flitter-flutter at the periphery, bawling and yelling at Papa. Quite rudely, I might add.
    . . .
    â€œFor the love of God, Jurgis, get her to the hospital!” Surprise number two—that’s right, count ’em up—Papa and Mama defied her. “No,” they said. “No no no.”
    . . .
    Because the Kimball hospital was a grim and perilous place. Mama heard stories of this one or that one, and it always ended the same:
Go inside, not come out.
    . . .
    Surprise number three, oh, that was the doozy: Papa with a scalpel. He gave me something from his satchel, a powder that Mama mixed with the whiskey, and I fell calm. “Ona-my-love,” he whispered. His eyes were so blue and fond. “Don’t scare, don’t scare,” he said. So I didn’t. I didn’t “scare.” I did go a little hazy, though, as you might imagine, floating there, connected to the shushing of my parents, about whom I knew so little. I longed to speak to Papa in the language they’d denied me. But it was too late; I was Maud-Lucy’s American girl. I couldn’t summon a single word. “I thought you were a cherry farmer,” I said to Papa. “Also doctor,” he said, and the next thing I knew Laurentas was screaming his head off. An August potato with good lungs.
    . . .
    Never. Maybe they didn’t have the vocabulary. How do you come up with the American words for scalpel? For whiskey in an egg cup? For country doctor and cherry farmer who packed up his family to take a job in a mill five thousand miles from home? It must have been a complicated story.
    . . .
    Maud-Lucy, well. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that she planned to raise the baby in Vermont, among her own people. How could a woman like that return to those boring apple trees? Those big, square uncles and sickly aunts?
    . . .
    Well, she could. She did. Maud-Lucy herself was a big, square woman. It took me a time to sort out that she wasn’t beautiful. Too plain for a rich man, too bright for a poor one. Unmarried ladies took