Free The Last Noel by Michael Malone

her dress. Looking nothing at all like his homely father, Roland was tall with black shiny curls and skin that always looked tan. He was—she was amazed to see—larger than her slender father. Over his tuxedo he wore a gray wool coat that made him appear completely grown-up. His eyes were as blue as the under glaze of the Chinese jar on the console. The first time she’d seen those blue eyes burning into her, last August at Pinky Mann's pool party, she’d felt as if her legs were melting. To avoid his stare, she had abruptly dived into the pool and then had swum underwater until she had stopped feeling as if she had been stung by bees. The second time, he was holdingin the crook of his arm his white football helmet and when he called, “Hi Noni,” up into the stands, she saw that his eyes were the color of the blue hawk on his helmet. Roland Hurd was so handsome and so popular that when Noni had phoned to tell her friend Bunny that he had asked her, although she was only a sophomore, to the Senior Christmas dance, Bunny had said, “No way.” And another friend had screamed so loudly into the phone at the news that it had hurt Noni's ear.
    â€œLook here at my princess,” her father told Roland, handing her over at the foot of the stairs. “Have you ever seen anyone so beautiful in your whole life?”
    Roland, whose perfections she could read in her mother's eyes, politely said that he never had.

    Each night when Amma Fairley left Heaven's Hill, she walked through its galleries and hallways and up and down its stairs and turned off all the lights in its empty rooms. Each night, an hour or two later, when she looked out across the lawn from Clayhome as she was looking now, all the lights were back on and the big white house was blazing out at her as if the people living inside it had set it on fire. All these years and she couldn’t teach the Tildens to stop wasting electricity. They were careless, or they were scared of the dark, or maybe they were both. Even when Judy and her husband had been living alone in the house, when Wade was off in college and they’d sent little Noni up North to that boarding school after Judy’d said she didn’t think much of the Moors schools anymore; even then the two of them had kept the lights on in almost every one of the seventeen rooms in Heaven's Hill, even the children's rooms.
    Amma sat by the lamp at her kitchen window sewing her sunflowers onto the aprons she’d made. Pulling off her glasses,she threaded the needle with yellow thread. From the next room came the bland murmur of television voices, Tat listening to his programs with the Labrador dog, Philly, lying on the floor by his wheelchair. Amma had her old radio on beside her, Mahalia Jackson singing “Go tell it on the mountain.”
    Of course, she thought, when you lose a child like the Tildens had lost Gordon over in Vietnam, it makes you so scared about the others you need the lights on. Even four years later. When that phone call had come that Gordon was gone, Amma and little Noni had grabbed Judy just in time as she dropped straight to the floor. After that it was like Bud and Judy Tilden just didn’t have the strength to come through things together. It was like that news about Gordon took all the hope out of their marriage. Amma could see how they blamed each other and how they blamed themselves. She could see Bud Tilden turning more and more to drinking alone. She could see Judy just freezing up, like she’d packed her heart in ice so she’d never have to feel it again.
    It was Mr. Tilden who took the call, three years back now, from that school up North about how they’d had to rush Noni to the hospital with pneumonia just a few months after she’d gotten there. Twelve years old, up North by herself, alone in that hospital. Now Noni's mama Judy had been sick all the time when she was little, but Amma hadn’t even believed all those