his mother-in-law. She slept fitfully, her chin resting on her sagging breasts, and
her half-empty whiskey glass tilting precariously to one side. An unlit cigarette
protruded obscenely from her lips, and as she wheezed in and out the cigarette
bobbed up and down, threatening to fall into the whiskey glass in her hand.
Jeromy rose, took the cigarette gently from her mouth, cautiously lifted the
glass out of her hand, and set them both on the coffee table. He picked up three
more logs from the wood box, arranged them in a pyramid over the now
smoldering coals, and knelt down in front of the fireplace, poking the fire and
blowing hard so the logs would catch.
"I shouldn't be so hard on her," he thought, "she's had a pretty rough life,
that's for sure." He remembered the stories Mary used to tell him of how her
mother had been physically and sexually abused as a child. He thought of Harriet's
husband, whom he had never met, but who, after years of beatings and drunken
rages, had left her to raise Mary and her four sisters all alone. "A life like that
could really do some emotional damage to a person," he mused. "I guess it's
not totally her fault the way she is." He turned and stared at her misshapen figure,
her worn hands tough as rawhide, and the scar just beneath her ear where her
husband had stabbed her with a pocket knife. "Love the unlovely," Jesus had said.
Was it Jesus? He wasn't sure, but it didn't matter; it sounded like a good thing to
do. How he would actuate that thought, he didn't know, but he resolved to try.