The Queen of Palmyra Read Online Free Page B

this family if nobody else around here was going to put food on the table. We’d been dragged from pillar to post, and, like it or lump it, she was planting her feet back on solid ground. He could come if he wanted to, but she was going home and taking me and don’t forget that her daddy is a lawyer.
    When I heard her lay down the law like that, my sinuses all of a sudden popped wide open, and I felt like I just had poked my head out from under a smothering blanket. I took the first deep breath I’d breathed in a year.
    After that night there were days of nobody talking and a flurry of boxes to mail our things to Mimi and Grandpops in Millwood (C.O.D.). About a week later I woke up before light. Daddy was kicking the leg of my cot. “Get up, Sister, hurry up.” He spit the words out of his mouth one by one. They fell to the floor like stones. We took the Greyhound bus straight from Houston to Jackson, getting off only to eat nabs and drink Orange Crush and go to the bathroom in dusty depots with brown-stained spittoons. Mama and Daddy made me ride in the seat between them for the whole day and night that the trip took. Daddy sat on the aisle and closed his eyes. Mama turned her head away from him to the window and looked out over the passing fields and swamplands and monster oil rigs until her eyelashes touched the dark circles underneath them and she fell into a deep sleep. I was the only one with my eyes open, and I wanted the window, for theair if nothing else, but knew better than to ask Mama. She and Daddy couldn’t have stood to be any closer to each other than they were. I was the fly in the ointment that kept them together, and I needed to stay stuck.
    The land whipped by. It was the last day of April when we left, and the trees were forcing out their new leaves. Everything looked hopeful, even the warthogs standing in clumps in the Louisiana swamps. They rubbed their snouts up and down expectantly on the old tree trunks and vines as if they were polishing themselves up for a party. There’d been a rain, and the restoration fern on the swooping oaks had perked up and turned from brown to green.
    We sat way up in the front of the bus because Daddy said he didn’t want to be close to Them. He said they stunk and their food stunk. When he said all that right out loud as Mama and I were climbing the steps onto the bus, Mama stopped short on the top step and turned around and looked down at him like she was going to kick him square in the face. I was on the middle step between them, and actually ducked. He shut up, but he shoved me into the second set of seats and then grabbed Mama, who was going on down the aisle, and told her to get in too. She jerked her arm away like his hand had burned her, but she turned around and, instead of making a fuss, climbed over me to the window seat. As the hours went by, I decided that the people in the back smelled fresher than I was beginning to and their little paper sacks with glistening grease spots made my mouth water. Their eyes flitted over us like lazy flies but never settled.
    By the time we rolled into the Jackson depot on the second day, it was almost dark and the katydids were revving up. Sticky from the heat and leaden from the silent heavy journey, we tumbled off the bus into Mimi’s talcumed arms, at least Mama and I did. Daddy hung back and shook hands with Grandpops anddid a little bow in Mimi’s direction. In honor of the occasion, Mimi had on one of her more subdued hats, a little black straw number with a cluster of drooping strawberries and a red wisp of a veil that stood straight up so that she looked like a Roman soldier. Mimi’s hats were wild things. Grapes and feathers, cherries and ribbons and doodads. The top shelf of her closet was stacked with pretty-colored hat boxes, round and square, large and small, where all shapes and sizes and colors waited in their crisp tissue nests.
    Grandpops squatted down in front of me, his bony knees popping, and