Sadie-In-Waiting Read Online Free

satisfaction “—it’s not just veterans. They let them girls in.”
    “What?” Sadie threw her hands up and shook her head. “What girls?”
    “The ones with sparkly doodads all over and the high hair that they perch up on the back seat of open-air cars.”
    “They perch their hair on the back seat of cars?”
    “You know what I mean.” He did a passing fair imitation of a beauty queen in all her glory giving the regal wave to an adoring audience.
    He didn’t have to act it out for her, of course. She had once been one of those girls gone gliding through town with a smile as immovable as her lacquered hairdo. And because of her former glory, she was still asked to join the annual float.
    Dogwood Blossom Queen . An honor bestowed on “the sweetest bloom of the senior class, a girl lovely of face and fair of temperament,” or so the Wileyville High School yearbook always touted her. Wholesome. Chaste. And dutiful to a fault.
    In other words, if the good folks of Wileyville had been a passel of heathens instead of, as the monument across from the Point proclaimed, “A community built on four faiths: God, family, patriotism and self-reliance,” being chosen Dogwood Blossom Queen would have been the equivalent of getting selected “girl most likely to be thrown into a volcano.”
    “They have to have the queen and her court in the parade, Daddy. They’re like…” She pictured her sweet, obedient, younger self jumping into a smoking crater and managed to muster up a half shrug. “They’re like old-fashioned apple pie.”
    “Half-baked?” He winked.
    “Oh, excuse me, but that’s a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it?”
    “You the kettle? Because you’re one of them girls, and I don’t recall you ever serving in any wars.”
    Wars? She fought one daily just to get by, and his nonsense did not make it any easier on her . But she couldn’t say that out loud, so she just sighed and muttered, “Daddy, that’s just a tradition. They ask that every woman ever elected a Dogwood Blossom Queen ride on the float. And honestly, I don’t consider it any great honor, either, to be hauled through town on the back of a flatbed truck wearing a faded prom dress under the banner Our Bygone Blossoms.”
    The humor of that had not been lost on the town. Every Fourth of July the eldest members of the South and Central Civic Charities Club made an appearance in that parade, standing in the back of a pickup decked in toilet-paper “gowns” while someone walked ahead carrying the sign Our Old Queens. Given an option, Sadie would rather have ridden with them.
    “Your sisters can be in the parade. Is April a veteran? Is Hannah? Hardly.”
    “They were Petal Maidens.” The all-girl court that attended the Dogwood Blossom Queen each spring. “And they don’t do the parade, Daddy.”
    Something for which Sadie admitted a grudging admiration.
    “Maybe they don’t, but what about our towheaded little pistol of a pal? Martha Tatum Fitts McCrackin.”
    Moonie loved to say the whole name of Sadie’s best friend, who rented the back half of the Downtown Drug building to run the Royal Academy of Charm and Beauty. He loved the cadence of it, he said, especially since shemarried Royal McCrackin fifteen years ago. And he never missed a chance to shout it out to the woman everyone else called simply, Mary Tate. Mary Tate egged him on, waving and cooing and blowing him big exaggerated kisses whenever or wherever he called to her.
    “Now, our Martha Tatum waltzes her brood down the street every year, doesn’t she?”
    “Daddy, I’ve told you a thousand times those are not Mary Tate’s children. Those are some of her students doing what she calls a salute to our American service people in tap dance and precision flag twirling.”
    “I don’t care if she calls it Betsy Ross and the Star-spangled Supremes. It’s a bunch of rhythmically impaired youngsters with glitter glued on their gym clothes waving ribbons