Georgia Bottoms Read Online Free

Lord. Gene knows he got his own self into this mess. And he’s going to need the help of not just the Lord but his whole church family to get out of it.”
    “That is really so interesting,” Georgia said.
    “You didn’t stop anything,” said Brenda. “You just postponed it.”
    Poor Eugene. To let himself be run over by this bulldozer—and for nothing! Georgia didn’t want to marry him anyway! He was a nice diversion on a Saturday night, but one night a week was enough.
    He must have had to do some big-time confessing when he got home last night. Which is how he wound up in the pulpit with this gun to his head.
    Georgia was tired of acting ladylike. She was ready to move on to the slapping and hair pulling. She was strong, she could take this tub of lard with no difficulty. “I don’t think there’s any need for a scene, do you, Brenda? You want your girls to hear?”
    “How dare you. You leave my girls out of this!”
    Georgia spoke softly. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
    “Damn it, Brenda!” Out of his holy robes, in khaki Dockers and a white shirt, Eugene Hendrix looked unmistakably mortal. “I told you I’d talk to her!”
    Brenda whirled on him. “Where are the babies?”
    “Outside. There’s plenty of folks out there to keep an eye on them.”
    “You left them by
themselves?
Are you out of your mind? Have you forgot about JonBenét? You go back out there this instant! I’m handling this.”
    Eugene looked relieved to have an order to obey. He turned to go.
    “Eugene, don’t you move,” Georgia said. “You told her about us?”
    He stopped. His face flushed red. “She found out.”
    “He was calling you from our
home,
” Brenda wailed, “like I’m too stupid to listen in on the extension?”
    Georgia turned to Eugene. “Dummy, if you wanted to leave your wife for me, don’t you think you could have discussed it with me first?”
    She couldn’t quite decipher the look on his face—confusion and something oddly out of place. Sympathy? She plunged ahead.
    “I did the only thing I could think of, Eugene. I couldn’t sit there and let you ruin my life—and your life, too! What were you thinking?”
    “I have to come clean,” he said. “This sin is weighing so heavy on me. It’s pressing down on my soul. I’ve been living a lie, Georgia. I can’t go on like this.”
    He didn’t sound at all like himself. He sounded like the guy who’d had to explain it to Brenda last night.
    “Eugene, listen to me. I don’t
want
you to leave her. I don’t
want
to marry you. Do you understand?”
    “Marry? That’s a hoot,” Brenda said. “What makes you think he would ever leave me? And our babies? For a tramp like you?”
    “Now come on, Brenda,” Eugene huffed, “there’s no need for that kind of thing.”
    Georgia said, “One of us is crazy, Eugene. Who is it? Her or me?”
    “Tell her, Gene,” cried Brenda, “tell her what you were going to say when she put on her little fainting act.”
    Eugene’s eyes didn’t make it all the way up to meet Georgia’s. He pressed his lips together, looked at the floor, and sighed as men do:
None of this is my fault.
    That’s when Georgia understood the truth. Brenda was not the fool in the room. Georgia was.
    Eugene was not leaving his wife. He was staying with her.
    No doubt this was mostly Brenda’s doing, but Eugene had to be in on it too. They’d worked it out between them. In a desperate attempt to save their marriage, Eugene intended to denounce Georgia in front of the congregation as a home wrecker, a wicked woman. Never mind that he was the one skulking down the alley to Georgia’s garage apartment every Saturday night, it was always Eugene who came to see Georgia.
Never
the other way around.
    Georgia didn’t know why she was attracted to men like this—the good-looking, nice-seeming, treacherous type. She vowed to start working on that as soon as she got the hell out of this church.
    “What we did was just plain wrong,