Free Here in My Heart: A Novella (Echoes of the Heart) by Anna DeStefano Page B

there to visit her friend in the morning, just as soon as she settled things with Brad.
    She could have headed straight for Marsha and Joe’s for another night. But avoiding Brad again would only delay the inevitable. At least he hadn’t been waiting for her at the Douglas house. She had a little more time before he got home to collect her thoughts.
    The doorbell rang. Her stomach did a nosedive. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. How could she possibly feel so nauseous? She walked toward the door and yanked it open, wondering why Brad would bother knocking.
    “Dad?”
    “Hey, honey.” Joe’s weathered features broke into a smile. He opened his arms, and she walked straight into the hug he gave her each time they saw each other.
    He was a tall man prone to wearing plaid shirts: short-sleeved and linen in the summer, cotton the rest of the year, except for the long-sleeved flannel he preferred when their Southern weather took a whimsical turn toward the freezing mark, like now. Her foster father always smelled like the peppermints he kept in his front pocket, along with his reading glasses. And he always felt like security and home and permanence to Dru, even though she’d noticed him slowing down lately, and she and Marsha had worried since the summer that he needed to slow down more.
    She pulled back. She brushed a thick tuft of white hair out of his eyes.
    “Are you sleeping?” she asked. “You look tired. What are you doing out this late on a Saturday?” She didn’t have her phone with her to check the time, and she hadn’t worn a watch in years. “I worked closing tonight. It’s got to be almost midnight.”
    “Yeah, but this is important, and I figured you’d still be up.”
    He stepped past her. She shut the door and followed him into the parlor. He looked around and chuckled instead of sitting.
    “I can remember being in here when I was a kid,” he said. “Not much older than Lisa. This was the creepiest room, with all of Vivian’s clocks ticking and whirring at once, sounding off on the half hour while I waited for my parents to come get me. I’d broken her side window and a lamp with a baseball. She made me sit on that red couch and watch her pet a mangy old cat she had back then, until my mother arrived. It took forever. I thought for a minute that maybe no one would ever come, that I’d never get to leave Old Lady Douglas’s house, the way the stories the kids told said other kids hadn’t, because she lived alone and that’s what kids say about old ladies in old houses who act like they don’t like anyone. She couldn’t have been much more than fifty then, but she looked pretty much the same as she does now. I was terrified of her.”
    “Most kids are at first.”
    “Not you.” Joe’s grin spread lightness through Dru. Seeing him proud of her always did that. “You met Vivian when you were six, selling Girl Scout cookies. Of course, you wouldn’t wear your uniform like the other girls when you sold door-to-door. You said your pink dress would make people happy and want to buy more. You were already Miss Do-It-Yourself. You insisted on walking over here alone. You told me later you thought the cranky old lady who answered the door was sad, not scary the way the other kids said. You asked her if you could tell her a joke. Two hours later, Marsha got a call from Vivian demanding that we come pick you up before you talked her ear off—and that we bring you by one afternoon the next week, because you’d agreed to help her with chores around the house in return for making what she called pin money. The most fearless thing about you, Dru, has always been the way you unconditionally love people. You just keep loving them, no matter what they or anyone else say, whether they want to be loved or not, until they relent and let you into their hearts.”
    Dru shook her head and wiped at her eyes with the cuff of her sweatshirt, already missing her friend.
    “When your mom came that day,”