Little Bitty Lies by Mary Kay Andrews

Author:Mary Kay Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061827372
Publisher: HarperCollins

42

The Fourth of July was on a Thursday. On Wednesday, Mary Bliss picked her first tomato of the summer. It was a huge red treasure, an old-fashioned variety called Mortgage Lifter, whose seeds she saved from year to year. She put the tomato in her gardening basket, along with half a dozen crookneck squash and a single cucumber, and carried it triumphantly into the house.

Her mama had always aimed to pick her first tomato of the summer by the Fourth. Mary Bliss wished Nina could have been there to see her gorgeous Mortgage Lifter.

She knew what she had to do with that tomato. She washed and peeled it, then carefully cut it into thick slices, which she then salted and peppered and placed on a pretty pink-flowered saucer.

The tomato would be a sacrificial offering to Eula—her own personal act of contrition for the awful lie she’d been living for the past few weeks.

Mary Bliss packed the rest of her offertory—homemade macaroni and cheese and a thick slice of chocolate layer cake, into the small blue cooler. She’d picked a few flowers, some daisies, cosmos, zinnias, and bee balm, and these she wrapped with a damp paper towel before inserting them into a jelly jar and placing them in the cooler.

She dawdled in the kitchen, arranging more flowers in the yellow McCoy vase she kept on the windowsill, putting the extra squash in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. What she was really doing was delaying her departure for the nursing home.

She dreaded seeing Eula, dreaded hearing her rail against “colored nurses” and “Jew doctors” who were conspiring against her. Most of all, she dreaded facing her mother-in-law, who at every weekly visit reminded Mary Bliss that Parker was alive, somewhere, on an island, and would soon return to free her from this nursing home hell, and to have Mary Bliss thrown in the slammer.

“Don’t pay her no attention,” Lillian King, Eula’s nursing supervisor, advised her the week before. “She’s just trying to get you upset. That’s part of the disease, bless her heart. She wants extra attention. She tells all kinds of stories. Last week? Said she’s gonna replace Ethel Merman on Broadway. She was beltin’ out ‘No Business Like Show Business’ in chapel, while everybody else was singing ‘Walk with Me, Jesus.’ And in craft shop? You know what she did? Everybody else made themselves a nice little ashtray. Miss Eula? She took that clay, and she made…” Lillian King turned her head, embarrassed. “I hate to say what she made, Miz McGowan.”

“You can tell me,” Mary Bliss prompted.

Lillian King put her hands up to Mary Bliss’s ear and whispered. “She made a penis.”

“Really?” Mary Bliss was astonished.

“Yeah,” Lillian King said. “And you know what? Her memory ain’t all that bad.”

When she could stall no longer, Mary Bliss went out to load up the car. But a dark sedan was pulling up into the driveway, blocking her in.

It was Matt Hayslip.

He jumped out of the car, leaving the motor running, and jogged over to her.

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