Wedding Ring
After she surrendered to the inevitable and gave up trying to make her grandmother open the front door, Tessa MacRae resigned herself to spending the rest of the sweltering morning in what passed for shade on the front porch. The time wasn't completely wasted. From the vantage point of a creaking old swing, she could observe almost everything she needed to know about her grandmother's world.
First, in an area renowned for its natural splendor, this little corner of the Shenandoah Valley was not holding up its end.
The evaluation was interrupted by the screech of a window being wrenched open just above her.
"You still down there, missy? I didn't ask you to come, you know, and I sure didn't ask for these!"
At thirty-seven, Tessa, a high-school English teacher, hadn't been a "missy" for a number of years, but this was not the moment to object. A rattling followed Helen Henry's words, and suddenly the air was filled not with much-needed rain, but with balls of paper sliding off the tin roof to the ground below. Tessa tried to count them as they fell. A dozen, at least. Then, after a pithy pause, half a dozen more.
The window above the ... read full excerpt from: Wedding Ring ebook