Free The Reading Lessons by Carole Lanham

like me then, Lucinda?”
    “You know I do.” 
    She was holding something behind her back. Her monkey-flower eyes twinkled with excitement. “I’ve brought you a new book, my darling. When you’re better, we’ll read it together. Just like Dracula.”
    Twisting her monocle into place, she spoke against his ear. “It’s called The Pit and Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe.”
    ###
    At the first sign of hope, Cuffy set up a camp cot in the Rose Bud Parlor, and Hadley was moved from the pickling closet. The doctor said a window would provide him with the“healing enjoyment of a fresh and salubrious breeze”. Since no one knew that it was actually Lucinda who saved his life, much was made of that salubrious breeze. 
    After Hadley got a window, things seemed to be headed in the right direction. His color returned. His wound stopped bleeding. He ate a lot of soup. He missed her mouth on his throat so much that he dreamed vampire dreams most every night. The dreams were healthier than the real thing, but one night, the cot squeaked, and someone sat down next to him. Hadley felt her hand in his hair, and he jumped and turned and reached for her. 
    Just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, Lucinda had raised him. The difference being, Jesus didn’t kill Lazarus before he raised him. Hadley was relieved to feel her hands again. He didn’t really want her to go back on her word but figured it probably wouldn’t kill him if she did it just this once. 
    “I’ve missed you, Lucinda,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you so much.”
    The gas lamp lit with a pop. 
    Mama sat on the edge of the cot swallowing as though a hundred years of bad mistakes were jammed up in her gullet. “Lucinda?” she mumbled around the mistakes. “Why in hell would Miss Lucinda be crawling into your bed at two o’clock in the morning?”
    In the time it took to heave a single trembling breath, Mama’s eyes grew big and round as she visibly tallied up all the whispers and notes and reading lessons. She didn’t believe that people like the Brownings gave two cents about people like the Crumps. As a matter of fact, Hadley was deadly certain that Mama had never so much as glimpsed the buttercup hair or the teasing smile he saw every time he looked at Lucinda Browning. When Mama looked at Lucinda Browning, she saw eyes that never saw her back, and that was an entirely different thing. It had never occurred to Mama that Lucinda might actually see Hadley.
    It was beginning to occur to her, though. Dozens of uneasy memories unscrolled behind her eyes like the naughty half of St. Nick’s list. She looked at the Whoops Jar on the washstand. “What have you done, Hadley?”
    Hadley held his chin proud. “Maybe we’re in love,” he said.
    “Oh honey,” she said, tears transforming her eyes into two glassy pools. “I hope you don’t believe that.”
    ###
    Mama had all sorts of ideas about who was supposed to love who, and Hadley had been hearing those ideas all his life. Mama rattled them off like other mothers rattled off bedtime stories. Some of her stories even sounded as though you could find them in a real book. Once upon a time there was a spinning girl who fell in love with the wrong boy . . .  The trouble was that all of Mama’s bedtime stories had sad endings, and this did not work out well in a story that was meant to put a child to sleep. 
    The story she told most was the story of Hadley’s father, a smarmy Gothamite with a pencil mustache and a hundred dollar-smile. He was a door-to-door salesman who sold everything from suction sweepers to Pleasant’s Purgative Pellets . Mama said he’d gummed just about everyone he ever knew. 
    Not surprisingly, they met at the front door. Mama was putting a pie out to cool. Daddy was pitching McIlhenny’s. “Blame it on hot sauce,” Mama liked to say.
    Mama fell for Daddy because he wore nice suits and had very white teeth. He also brought her lots of presents. While it was true that