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mouth to match. Bartholomew knew for a fact that the woman was somewhere on the far side of 65, because he had seen her squirreling away her social security checks for years. But Gladys had stopped counting the years, and so had everybody else. Bartholomew always figured Gladys Ann could get away with it because there weren't too many around who could still remember when she first arrived on the scene. His father had told him that G.A., as the old man called her, had simply showed up one day, panhandling and mooching her way to her sister's house in Metamoras. The old boy took a liking to her, and she had been a part of the Gull House ever since, a stretch of time that now dated back more than 30 years. |
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Bartholomew, returning home after his stint in the army, had heard all kinds of stories about her, some of which intrigued him, all of which he discounted through the process of rationalization after his father died. Gladys Ann stayed on, and whatever the real truth about her checkered past was, she had become the house mother and the heart and soul of the Gull House. It was her passion, her obsession, her lover. He was convinced that in Gladys Ann's mind the Gull House was actually hers and he was just a part of the unfortunate legacy. |
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She reached around behind her and |
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