Good Graces Read Online Free Page B

person is the worst thing you can do in life. I should know. Dave had to honor his mother’s wishes and not just because he didn’t want to be haunted; it’s the Fourth Commandment. So better late than never. They’re planning to say their I do ’s right after the annulment letter from the Pope comes in the mail. They need the go-ahead from His Holiness because Mother can’t get a divorce. Not the way Lutherans do. The only other thing a Catholic woman can do if she doesn’t want to be married anymore to a louse like Hall Gustafson is to pray that he gets stabbed in the neck with a fork when he’s serving his time.
    “Sorry ’bout that livin’ in sin crack,” Mary Lane leans in and says to me in a much nicer voice. She didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, just Troo’s. Mary Lane hasn’t figured out yet that’s impossible. On both counts.
    Sampson is getting very riled up. He musta heard Troo calling me names because he’s started putting on a show. Beating his chest and waving.
    I wave back at him like I always do, only much slower and sadder.
    Troo swats my hand down. “How many times do I gotta tell ya? He’s not . . . he’s just a stupid gorilla shooin’ away flies and . . . and don’t start up with how he’s singin’ Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. ”
    Mary Lane pushes her flat face into my sister’s beautiful one and says, “You got the heart of a jackal,” and then she shoves Troo, who shoves her back and two pokes later they are rolling around on the grass behind the bench. Mary Lane can pound the snot outta most anybody and Troo likes to fight more than ever, so I can count on these kinds of wrestling matches happening at least once a day. I normally try to break them up, but I’m too busy being a captive audience. Sampson is singing to me loud and clear.
    After she gets Troo to yell “ Oncle ,” Mary Lane plops back down next to me and says, “I’m gonna stick around and help my dad. Ya wanna?”
    I run my hand across the part of the bench where Daddy rested his strong shoulders.
    I’ve been meaning to ask Mary Lane, Do you know what they’re gonna do with this beat-up bench? If they’re just gonna chuck it out, we might have a place in our garden for it, but the words get stuck in my mouth, which is the first sign that I’m gonna start choke crying and if I do that, my sister’s gonna start hunh . . . hunh . . . hunh ing again, so as much as I want to spend what little time there is left with my magnificent king, I tell her, “Thanks, but no thanks. I gotta”—I point behind me to my sister—“you know.”
    Troo has already brushed the grass off her knees, adjusted her beret and is making her way down the path out of the zoo. The shopping bag with the talent trophy is making her lean a little to the right.
    Mary Lane cups her hands and shouts, “ Bon voyage , Leeze ,” making it sound like the worst kind of insult.
    When my sister stops in her tracks, I’m sure she’s gonna come barreling back to tackle our best friend around her knobby knees, but what she does instead is reach into the shopping bag and pull out her talent trophy. She lifts the Golden Tomahawk high above her head and with her other hand, she slowly, slowly flips Mary Lane the bird.
    Our best friend doesn’t go after her, she’s not even mad. Mary Lane laughs and says, “What a card,” because even though her and Troo throw themselves on the ground faster than you can say Jackie Robinson, they are alike in more ways than one. “Ya sure ya don’t wanna stay and help out? We’re gonna load up the rest of the animal food and what not. It’d be a good thing to put in your charitable summer story.”
    I really, really want to, but my sister is getting smaller on the path by the second. “I can’t.”
    “Suit yourself,” Mary Lane says, skipping off toward the cage where they used to keep the grizzly bears.
    After I catch up to Troo, I have to remember to tell her that she was right about one thing at