The Queen of Palmyra Read Online Free Page A

reasoned that she took me because she needed the beer, and she took me to the black bootlegger so she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.
    This was what I saw and nothing more than this. Us tooling down the highway, me sucking on the last of my milk shake now all melted, Mama’s scarf now slipping off her head, her bobbed hair blowing straight out to the sides, like wings.

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    That spring we’d gotten lucky when Mimi managed to get our little white house with the pretty trellis back. The previous renters had packed up and vamoosed in the middle of the night, leaving some moldy mattresses on the floor, roaches galore, and two months’ unpaid rent. Before we left for parts unknown, we’d lived in the house for three years, and it had been a step up for us. Then, out of the blue, Daddy had gotten it in his head he needed to find just the right job for someone of his talents. To this end, he dragged us all over the State of Mississippi and after that through parts of Texas that either flooded so bad he had to sweep the water moccasins off the front stoop of our apartment building or were so bone dry the earth had huge cracks, one of which Mama stepped into and broke her foot while she was hanging out clothes. We moved so much that there are places out there I lived whose names I don’t know to this day.
    During our year on the lam, I came down with mysterious ailments. Coughs, earaches, fevers, swollen glands, sore throats, what have you. Except for a few weeks in a little church schoolwhere each and every day began with singing, “The B-I-B-L-E, Yes, that’s the Book for Me,” etc., I missed the whole fourth grade. Mama worked for Kelly Girl here and there, but after a while they would drop her. In Houston, when they’d call at dawn on the pay phone right outside our apartment door on the concrete landing and say for her to go here or there, she usually had to say no, her little girl was sick again and she had to stay home and see about her. Sometimes, though, she shook me awake and whispered, “Honey, I’ll be gone for just a little while. I’ve just got to go. Go back to sleep and don’t mess with the stove,” and I would turn my face to the wall on my cot in the living room, which was also the kitchen and dining room.
    When Daddy finally got fired from his umpteenth job, which happened to be at Brown and Root in Houston, my mother didn’t bat an eye. She blew her bangs up off her forehead. They had gotten longer and covered her eyes. Over the months she had seemed to be hiding behind them. The only way I could judge her mood was by the set of her mouth, which, at that moment, was even more pinched than usual. She marched out the front door, not even bothering to close it behind her. She called Mimi and Grandpops collect on the pay phone outside and told them to wire the money, we were coming home. She came back into the apartment, threw one baleful look at Daddy, who was sitting with his head in his hands on the couch, and then headed off for the bedroom. We heard her pulling the suitcases out from under the bed. There wouldn’t be much packing. Nowadays she kept most of our things in the suitcases. There wasn’t room in most of the places we lived, plus what’s the point of unpacking just to have to pack again in a month or two?
    “Win.” Mama’s voice sliced through the wall.
    Daddy sat there a minute; his eyes darted around the room like he was looking for something he’d lost. Then he got up andwent on into the bedroom like a dog ready to be whipped. He shut the door behind him. Mama started in on him the minute he walked in. She didn’t even try to whisper. He could come back home or not, but she wasn’t going to live like a gypsy anymore. They had managed before in Millwood, they could manage again. She had given him a year to sort himself out and now she had to get on home where there were decent doctors and people to take care of me so she could get back to baking cakes and making a living for