Free A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) by Kaye Gibbons Page A

when the two children got caught in the middle, Roland was pushed to lie, steal, and hurt anything he touched, and June, thank goodness, was pushed to me, straight across her daddy’s field to me.
    It took everything Tiny Fran had to act civil towardsme, and when she was, there was a catch to it, something behind it, like the time they needed to go stay with her mother during an operation and she called over here, cordial, friendly as she could be. I kept wanting to say, “Get to the point, Tiny Fran, go ahead and get to the point.” And when she finally did she told me she wanted to know if Jack and I could look after June and Roland the week she and Burr would be gone. I knew that by then she’d called everybody she knew and they’d all said the same thing I was about to tell her, “June, fine, but I can’t handle Roland. I just can’t handle him.” He was too wild. I couldn’t control him. They ended up having to take Roland with them, leaving June here. She was six then.
    I can’t think of anything in the world, outside of a very good, very long dream, to compare that week with her to. I’ve not had another one like it. We’d all get up in the morning, play, have lunch, play some more, eat dinner, play. I’d have to nudge Jack out the door to go over to Burr’s and keep things running, keep the help busy. He said he’d rather stay here with us and weave potholders, and I believed him. She slept in the back bedroom with puppies she’d sneak out of the pen out back and turn into the house. Jack would wake me up in the middle of the night and tell me to go in there and look at the baby asleep in a bedful of dogs.
    When Burr came to get her he came in the kitchen andsat down by her and asked her if she’d had a good time. She wouldn’t answer. I told her to tell her daddy what all we’d done, maybe show him some of the potholders we’d made. But she wouldn’t speak. She wouldn’t even look at him for rolling her fists around in her eyes, shuffling her feet, shrugging when he touched her. I told her she should be sweet and he’d let her come and stay again, but I knew how she felt. I didn’t want to be sweet myself. Jack couldn’t watch her go. When he’d seen Burr driving up in the yard he went to the bathroom and told me to tell him he was tied up and would see him later that day.
    Some childless couples, my brother and his wife for one, get along by pretending that their dog or cat is a member of the family. And it’s all over television, all the money people are willing to spend on fancy pet food. Jack and I had sat here many a night laughing about a woman we saw at the bank who had her little poodle dressed in a Santa Claus suit. But we couldn’t say anything anymore, not after the way we behaved when June left.
    We were out in the yard not more than two days later, weeding, patching up the dog pen, and I noticed Jack over in the big circle Prince Albert ran around in. He had the dog up on his hind paws, holding his front ones, making him dance a little jig. Prince Albert was so old and floppy by then he just went along. Jack even called out for me to look at the dog dancing. And it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t tell the rest of it. I ran inside and got my Brownieand took half a roll of film of Jack making the dog dance. After all that Jack walked to the store and came back with canned dog food, and he went inside and came back out with it all scooped out in a good dish. While Prince Albert ate Jack explained to me about how nutritious the real meat chunks were, and I couldn’t help but think about how many times I’d reminded Jack to put a little spigot water in with that dry, cheap old dog chow, and how he’d told me gravy’ll take the edge off a dog. And there he was, throwing this old dog a little party.
    And we kept on, and it got worse. Jack would try his baseball hat on Prince Albert’s head and I’d break my neck trying to get inside and get the camera before he lost that