Between, Georgia Read Online Free Page B

cousins and, later, the tagalong girl-child Aunt Bernese produced when I was nine. The Crabtrees, Ona especially, paced at the periphery of my life, staring hungrily in at me.
    Ona Crabtree was half crazy, all mean, perpetually drunk, but she had a junkyard dog’s sharp memory for injuries against her person. She’d hated all things Frett from childhood: Ona and Bernese first bonked heads when they met up on the jungle gym behind The First Baptist Church of Between. Genny, fresh off a Baptist summer-revival high and aching to fulfill the Great Com-mission, shyly invited Ona to come on in to Sunday school with them. Ona accepted, but Bernese eyed Ona’s filthy sundress and added, “Run home and change first. We wear our nicest things to God’s house.”
    I’m sure it never occurred to her that perhaps the sundress was Ona’s nicest. Ona offered me that story ten thousand times as proof that Fretts were “fancy-pants faker Christians.” She never stopped hating them, and after she learned we were genetically connected, she never stopped hounding me. No one ever had a clue who my father was. Not even Hazel, and she’d left town. If not for Ona, I’d have been a Frett free and clear. As it was, my mother and her sisters stood over me like she-bears guarding a shared cub, ever vigilant and suspicious.
    The war that would tear up our little town percolated mostly under the surface, with an occasional minor skirmish cropping up here and there. Bernese routinely cut Ona dead in the market, and when I was growing up, the Crabtree boys egged the Frett homes every Halloween. (Or they did until the year Bernese spent all night crouched in her front bushes with a loaded shotgun. Those boys came sauntering down to the end of Grace Street just after three in the morning, and Bernese waited until she could see the whites of their eyes before she discharged the gun into the air, scattering them.)
    At eighteen I moved an hour away to study anthropology at the University of Georgia, but my absence did not make the Frett and Crabtree hearts grow any fonder. I came home every other weekend, and after I graduated, my stays became longer and more frequent, so the wounds remained forever fresh and open.
    The feud ebbed and renewed in a thousand small ways even during my absence, receding and resurging before it reached crit-ical mass and exploded. The Fretts blamed the escalation on the Crabtrees, and the Crabtrees blamed it on the Fretts. And I, the only one who might have stopped it, was caught up in a battle of my own that was raging through the half of my life I lived in Athens.
    Later, when I knelt in the ruins of Between, sifting through drifts of ash and bits of twisted metal and scorched glass, the thwarted archaeologist in me insisted that the only way I could have prevented the war would have been to strangle myself with my own umbilical cord before I pulled my first breath. I never became that archaeologist. My BA prepped me for grad school, but I didn’t go, so I can’t place much store in my findings. I ended up a sign language interpreter, but I’m a good one. I may not be able to reach into the past to reconstruct my family’s losses, but I can read the signs around me and meld them into a single story. One I believe is kissing cousins with the truth.
    The morning of the day it all went to hell, I don’t know if it was Jonno or the phone that woke me up. Jonno was in the habit of groaning and muttering himself awake, and he went off at about the same time the ringer did. I looked at the clock and then rolled over and put one hand over his mouth. His eyes opened, and under my palm, I could feel his mouth stretching into a smile.
    We’d had our very last ever goodbye sex the night before. For about the twenty-second time.
    “Morning, Nonny,” he said cheerfully, his words muffled by my palm.
    I said, “Do not talk or make any noise. No reasonable human being calls this early, so that has to be Aunt Bernese. She