The Funeral Dress Read Online Free Page A

desperate to keep close for a time, preferring to believe that this ever-changing family of angels watched out for her. Emmalee stood a moment longer and studied the trunk.
    She fingered Ida Lawson’s cross. The wood looked fresh and new compared to the others. The cancer that had teased Ida once long ago took her life fast this time. Emmalee thought that was particularly unkind, and for that reason alone, she made Ida’s cross a little larger than the others. Leona told Emmalee they had buried Ida without a bra or her fake breasts. “Ida was tired of pretending she had something that wasn’t there and didn’t want nothing binding her in heaven,” Leona said. Ida had even insisted she be buried barefoot, wanting only a pair of knitted socks “to keep her feet warm.”
    Emmalee smiled at the memory of the older seamstress who had always been kind to her. Then she looked toward the top of the trunk and to the only cross she couldn’t leave behind when she left this place for good. Balanced on her toes, she tugged on the one belonging to her mama. But she stumbled backward empty handed. She approached the trunk a second time, stepping onto a knotted root. Emmalee reached for the cross with herother hand and lifted it free from a nail driven deep into the oak. She stood steady among the leaves and raised the cross to her lips.
    A creaking, rattling sound echoed in the distance and disappeared. Again Emmalee turned her ear toward the main road. She tucked the cross inside her coat and ran back to the house. Tomorrow she would carry Kelly Faye out of Red Chert to where Leona and Curtis would be waiting for her.

L EONA
    O LD L ICK
    Late Afternoon
    Worn out from another long day at the factory, Leona eased from the pickup, her navy purse and a grocery sack dangling in her right hand. Curtis lingered behind the steering wheel, jiggling the key in the truck’s ignition. He pounded the dashboard with the palm of his fist, but the engine sputtered and coughed as if it had taken ill. Leona turned her back to him and walked across the gravel drive, staring with glazed eyes at their home of twenty-one years.
    The trailer was bled dry from a lifetime of rough living, its aluminum skin turned chalky and pocked with rusted sores. Her gaze was steady as Leona remembered seeing the trailer for the first time. It was shiny and new and she was so young, her hair black and her skin smooth. But what once gleamed brightly in the late afternoon sun stood dying, a metal carcass left to rot ona frame of cinderblocks. Through the years, Leona had grown accustomed to the trailer’s slow and subtle deterioration much as she had the ever-deepening lines around her eyes and mouth. She frowned and furrowed her brow, worried how it might appear to Emmalee.
    Leona tugged on her sweater, stretching it further across her body. The temperature in the valley had dropped fast since lunch, and it was already a good five degrees colder up here. Curtis said they might even see the season’s first snowflakes by morning.A redbird rapped at the trailer’s far window, but it flitted off before Leona could blow a kiss and wish for something better. “Maybe,” she whispered, “something better is already on its way.”
    A strong wind gusted against her back, and leaves swirled and danced about her body, reminding Leona there was other work to be done. She shifted the paper sack holding a box of cornflakes to her left hand and walked on to the trailer door, scraping her canvas loafer across the metal threshold and letting the door slam shut behind her.
    Low-hanging clouds had kept the trailer dark most of the week. But the sun, hovering just above the mountain’s crest, at last carved a slim path through the drifting cover. An orange glow spilled through the wide window set by the trailer’s only door, and Leona welcomed the traces of warm light cutting across the floor. The trailer rocked to and fro like an anxious mother trying to soothe a fussing baby as a