Free The Surrogate, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book one by Leonard Foglia, David Richards Page B

vitamin formula! What’s this all about?”
    “What have you been doing, Aunt Ruth, going through my things?” Hannah’s outrage was matched by a feeling of helplessness, as if she were a child again, caught in a fib.
    “Never mind what I’m doing., This is my house. I can do whatever I like. What have you been doing? That’s the question.” The woman waved the brochure in Hannah’s face. “All this talk of overwork! Overwork, my ass! This is why you’re tired all the time, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it? Go ahead and admit it!”
    “You have no business in my room,” was all Hannah could muster in her defense.
    “All this time, I’m thinking, ‘The poor thing. Stuck at the diner day and night. No boyfriends. Never having any fun.’ Well, you sure pulled the wool over my eyes, didn’t you?”
    “It’s not what you think.”
    “It’s not? What is it then? Do tell!”
    After all the years under the Ritters’ roof, it was still the yelling that troubled Hannah the most, awakening all her old childhood fears, fears that the world could go out of control in an instant, that what was snug and secure one minute could be a mass of wreckage the next. She started to cry.
    “Oh, yes, go ahead, cry! A fat lot of good that will do you now.”
    Hannah backed into the hall. She hated her aunt to see her this way. Any display of weakness only goaded her to more vituperation.
    “Just like your mother,” Ruth was shouting. “Little Miss Perfect. Doing everything our parents asked of her. Kissing up to her teachers. Running off to church every Sunday. Butter wouldn’t melt in that one’s mouth. Well, I knew the truth. I knew about the boyfriends. I knew what was really going on. You’re just like her. Sneaky. A sneaky, little tramp!”
    “Don’t say that about my mother. You have no right! It’s not true and you know it.”
    “Your mother was a phony, who thought about no one but herself.”
    “And you…you’re…you’re nothing but a bitter, old woman.” Hannah couldn’t stop the words coming out of her mouth. “Bitter and spiteful because God punished you for having an abortion and you could never have children of your own. You’re mad at the whole world, even though it was all your own fault. You’ve always been jealous and hateful—”
    The tears in her eyes blinded her to her aunt’s advancing hand, but Hannah felt the sharp sting of the woman’s palm on her cheek. The force of the blow knocked her back onto the stairs and robbed her of her breath. Something in Ruth seemed to have snapped.
    Hannah lifted herself up and bolted for the front door. Outside, her feet sank into the lawn, which was spongy from the spring rain, and water seeped into her shoes. She flung open the door of the Nova.
    As the ignition turned over, grinding to a start, Ruth screamed from the doorway for all the neighborhood to hear.
    “And if you think you’re going to bring a little bastard into this house, you’ve got another thought coming.”

1:13
     
    “So, no boyfriend then, huh?”
    “No, ‘fraid not.”
    “What’s that say about my powers of deduction?” Teri expelled the air in her lungs with a loud whoosh. “Hon, you could tell me you were having a sex change and I doubt I’d be any more flabbergasted. Who knows about this?”
    “No one in Fall River. You’re the first person I’ve told.”
    “And you got this idea all by yourself?”
    “Yes.”
    “Goes to show how little we really know about people. You’re more complicated than I thought. Everybody is, of course. I guess most of the time we don’t bother to look below the surface. You don’t suppose Nick moonlights as a Chippendale dancer, do you?”
    Hannah didn’t pick up on the joke.
    The two of them were sipping hot tea over the breakfast table in Teri’s kitchen. The room, like the house itself, wasn’t neat by any stretch of the imagination. (How could it be when her family consisted of two hyperactive kids and a burly husband, who