Free The Debt Collector by Lynn S. Hightower Page B

the place was easy to find. It had a sort of homey charm, and Sonora felt guilty for being the bearer of bad news to a house built in the 1940s and painted buttercup yellow.
    The night before, when Sam and Sonora had broken their terrible news, Mrs. Cavanaugh had been nothing more than a phone number on the wall. This morning she greeted Sonora at Franklin Ward’s front door and invited her into a living room that smelled of coffee and bacon.
    Mrs. Cavanaugh—“call me Bonnie,” she had insisted—announced that she had hot biscuits on the stove with the air of one whose biscuits were never refused. Sonora felt vaguely comforted by this evidence that there were still people in the world who baked before breakfast. She had the feeling that she had stepped into another realm.
    She followed Bonnie Cavanaugh past the couch, glancing at the picture Ward had shown her before she left the night before, a shapshot, faded and creased and framed in tarnished silver, of Ward and his brother in uniform before they had gone off to fight in World War II.
    To fight in that war he would have to be … but there Sonora’s education or her early attention to it failed her. She did not remember the precise years of World War II. At a guess, she’d say 1942 or 1943.
    And even she, with her scant memory of history, had a sense of what a terrible thing that war had been. She paused in front of the picture, resisting the urge to pick up the frame. They were beautiful creatures from the past, Franklin Ward and his little brother, Emerson, tall and young in brand-new uniforms, immortalized by the local paper, teenage boys off to war. They had been no more than two years older than her own son was now.
    It was only when you had children that you realized wars were fought by babies.
    Bonnie Cavanaugh looked at Sonora over her shoulder, waiting politely. Her appearance did not add up to the sum of the whole. Taken in segments, she was almost comically unattractive. Crooked front tooth that protruded over her lower lip. Long, basset-hound face, sagging under years of excess poundage. Weird hair. Brown and frizzy, worn too long, pulled severely back from a face that had never been pretty.
    But there was something about her, a peaceful charm, that gave her a comforting glow. No doubt she had worries. The lines over the brows were too deeply etched to be merely age and sunshine, and the dual effects of stress and gravity had worn creases at either side of her mouth.
    But there was something about her. Perhaps it was nothing more than the woman’s quiet assurance, her air of life experience that had not marred the impressions of a basic goodness.
    Sonora had met people, men and women, who made the hair stand up on the back of her neck, men and women she would tear to pieces if they came to her front door and tried to cross the threshold into the air space of her children.
    Certainly this woman led an ordinary life. But to Sonora, she seemed extraordinary. She wanted to pull up a chair at that kitchen table and tell Bonnie Cavanaugh her troubles, tell her the dream about her brother and the whispers she had heard in her sleep, Joy’s voice saying her catechism.
    She had not planned to talk to the woman and she did not want a biscuit. But that was before she met Mrs. Cavanaugh, that was before she realized that this was the kind of woman you talked to.
    Bonnie Cavanaugh led Sonora into the kitchen and motioned her to a chair. Sonora settled in front of a worn maple corner cabinet that displayed the multicolored pastels of Fiestaware, originals, with chips and cracks and faded colors. Mrs. Cavanaugh put a pastel blue plate and a plaid cloth napkin in front of Sonora, served her two biscuits, and poured her a cup of coffee in a bone china cup that was white with deep rose flowers, a glued and glazed crack in the saucer beneath.
    Nothing at the table matched, but somehow it all went together, like couples who’ve been