The Right Thing Read Online Free Page B

dress? I got lots of pageant dresses. The Princess Anne sash’s back to the house,” Starr Dukes added. “My momma’s making all my sashes what I won into a quilt. We’re gonna stick it in my hope chest for when I meet Mr. Right.”
    â€œHuh,” I managed, impressed in spite of myself. A princess with a hope chest! “Well,” I said, “that’s nothing much. Last week I drove our car and ran it into the garage.”
    â€œAll by yourself?” Starr asked, eyes wide.
    â€œSure,” I said. “I stepped on the clutch instead of the brake. Mr. Tate had to fix up the front of the garage, and the car had to go to the shop.”
    Starr looked awed, and I decided in that instant she was my kind of people. “Want to play?” I asked hopefully. “We’ve got air-conditioning.”
    â€œMy poppa says air-conditioning is the Devil’s work. He says summer is God’s fiery time to remind us of the flames in you-know-where. Jesus cries when somebody turns on the television, you know. Television’s the Devil’s work, too.” Starr scratched at a mosquito bite on her bone-thin upper arm. “We don’t have a television set anymore. I surely miss it.” There were a lot of things missing at the Dukes house, Starr told me: lamps, the record player, a brand-new recliner, dishes, most of Starr’s mother’s clothes, and her sewing machine.
    â€œWe had to leave without our stuff ’cause it wouldn’t all fit in the car.” It seemed the folks at the last outpost of Christianity in Dry Prong, Louisiana, hadn’t truly appreciated the quality of Mr. Dukes’s preaching, so the family had made a decision to relocate in the middle of the night. “They’re all going straight to you-know-where,” Starr announced with conviction. “Momma brang my hope chest, though, and my pageant dresses.”
    â€œYou want some Kool-Aid?” I asked. It was getting on to the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was a steam iron on top of my head. Somehow we managed to get Starr over the fence in her pageant dress and trudged up the sloping lawn to the back door. The air in the glassed-in sunporch running across the back of the house—the conservatory, as my Grandmother Banks styled it—was almost as hot as the backyard. All the ferns and bromeliads slumped in a sullen bid for water and attention, the white wicker settees dusty from the summer’s long disuse.
    â€œY’all got a mighty big house,” Starr said, looking around. “Where’s the air-conditioning?”
    â€œIt gets cooler in the kitchen. Come on.”
    Methyl Ivory was across the wide center hall in the living room, pretending to iron while she watched television. “Methyl Ivory, can we have some Kool-Aid?” I yelled, already getting the big frosted pitcher out of the refrigerator. Starr had wandered into the living room with her hands clasped behind her back, the long dress a crumpled tide in her wake.
    â€œDon’t you touch nothing,” Methyl Ivory said to my new friend. “You be careful with that Kool-Aid,” she called to me. I slopped violently purple liquid into two glasses and carried them into the living room. Methyl Ivory warned me with a look that said I’d better not spill any.
    â€œOh, my!” Starr squealed. Her fingers entwined under her chin in delight, she was so entranced with the program on the television. “It’s Queen for a Day . That’s my most favoritest show.” Without so much as a glance at Methyl Ivory, she folded up in wrinkles of dirty sateen onto the Oriental rug in front of the ironing board, taking the glass of grape Kool-Aid out of my hand without even looking.
    â€œMmm-mmm.” Methyl Ivory cursorily ran the iron over a sheet, her eyes likewise glued to the small black-and-white screen. “That po’ woman.” I’d never seen the show, but