Weekends in Carolina Read Online Free Page A

memories of the bathrooms in his frat house. Knowing what was in store for him didn’t speed up his steps down the stairs.
    Aunt Lois obviously had more practice cleaning a house before a funeral than Trey did, a fact evident in the way the wood of the banisters sparkled. He peeked into his dad’s bedroom. Photos of his father and mother with different relatives were nicely displayed on the dressers. His mother’s sick room across the hall looked like any other guest bedroom in an old Piedmont farmhouse. As soon as his mother had gotten too sick to sleep through the night, she’d moved across the hall rather than disturb her husband’s sleep, a gesture Trey would have found touching if there was a possibility his father had ever said, “Don’t worry about me.”
    Aunt Lois was attacking the stove when he walked into the kitchen. “Bathroom.” She didn’t even look up.
    “Aunt Lois, nobody liked my father and there’s no wife to console. I seriously doubt anyone besides you will be dropping by with casseroles.”
    “Trey—” she still didn’t look up from her scrubbing “—I don’t care if you’re five or thirty-five, if you don’t get in that bathroom and start cleaning in thirty seconds, I will take a switch to your behind.”
    His aunt had always made good on her threats.
    Bathroom.
    * * *
    T HE FIRST RELATIVE knocked on the door thirty minutes before Aunt Lois had predicted. “That Gwen Harris,” his aunt muttered, “has had no respect for keeping decent time since she moved to the city.”
    Durham, a city of two hundred and fifty thousand souls, was the city Aunt Lois referred to, and downtown Durham was a bare thirteen miles from “downtown” Bahama, despite Aunt Lois’s sniff implying the other side of the world. But Aunt Lois and Uncle Garner had taken their share of Harris farmland and withstood mechanization, buyouts and the bald fact that tobacco causes cancer to keep and expand on a successful tobacco farm. She had no patience with the farmers who gave up their land for pennies to the dollar—even though she and Uncle Garner had profited from their sales—to move into the city. And she also had no respect for a man like Trey’s father, who had clung to his farmland like a virgin to her panties, but had been unwilling or unable to make the land useful.
    But, as Cousin Gwen dropping off her rolls being the first of many in a parade of relatives evidenced, blood is thicker than respect. And Aunt Lois had made the house presentable because Hank Harris had been a Harris, even if he’d been a distasteful one.
    Kelly slipped in through the kitchen door just after Gwen had said her condolences and left. “I saw her on Roxboro Road driving up here and took my time, just so I’d miss her,” his brother whispered to him. “I’ll see her at the viewing and that will be plenty enough of Cousin Gwen for me.”
    Unlike his aunt, Trey didn’t care that Cousin Gwen and her husband had left their farmhouse for a split-level in the city. Hell, having escaped to D.C. as soon as the ink on his college diploma had dried, he wasn’t one to judge. However, Gwen had been a crushing cheek pincher all of his childhood, and hadn’t even stopped when he’d hit puberty. Her kids had been just as awful, though in different ways. The eldest always made sure to include the mention of major life purchases in his Christmas letters. Every year between his accomplishments at work and the achievements of his kids was a description of the new boat/car/RV/lawn mower that the family had just purchased. It had bothered Trey a lot more when he’d been a poor country cousin. Now Trey just thought it was in poor taste and felt for all the pinched country cousins getting that letter every Christmas.
    During her short visit, Cousin Gwen had apologized for her children, who had to work and couldn’t make it over. Lucky for him and Kelly, they would be at the viewing. And the funeral. And back here after the funeral to eat