Waking Up in Dixie by Haywood Smith

Author:Haywood Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781429941938
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-09-13T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Howe and Patti arrived home late the next day. After a sullen hello and brief hug—clearly under duress—Patricia flew up to her room and slammed the door.

“That went well,” Howe said dryly, “don’t you think?” He made straight for the Advil in the cabinet over the dishwasher, and this time, Elizabeth didn’t blame him.

He inhaled deeply. “Wow. Fried chicken.”

“Homemade,” she said, following him into the kitchen. “It helped to pass the time while y’all were on the road.” She’d fixed Patricia’s favorite supper: fried chicken, butter peas, rice and gravy, broccoli and hollandaise, deviled eggs, and sliced tomatoes from the garden. Elizabeth had cooked all day, glad for the distraction.

The way things had been going, Elizabeth had feared a policeman would turn up at the door to tell her they’d been in an accident. She took a tall glass from the cabinet. “So, how’d it go with Patti?” she asked above the raucous jangle of ice from the dispenser in the refrigerator door, followed by the mechanical whoosh of filtered water. She handed the glass to Howe.

“Could have been worse,” he told her. “She could have jumped from the speeding car on the Interstate.”

“That bad, huh?” She handed him the glass.

His brows rose. “I kept telling myself to stay calm, that she was just testing me.” He managed a wan smile. “You’d be proud of me. I didn’t pull over once, and I hardly cussed at all. Only cried three times.”

“That’s an improvement,” she acknowledged. “Especially under the circumstances.”

He downed the Advil, then gulped half the water. “Well, at least she got it all out into the open. Said she wants to move out.” He gulped the rest like a man who’d been lost in the desert. “Whew. Thirsty. Got any tea?”

Like all his other appetites since he’d woken up, his thirst consumed him in the moment, to the exclusion of everything else.

Elizabeth refilled the tumbler from the fresh-brewed pitcher of tea lightly sweetened with real sugar, just the way Patricia and Howe liked it, then prodded him back to the matter at hand with, “So what did you tell her?”

He drained half the glass. “I told her she wasn’t a prisoner, but she’d have to do it without the car or any help from us. So she said she’d move in with Mama. When I said that wasn’t going to happen, she called Mama.”

“Who told her she could move in, I’m sure,” Elizabeth said.

“No.” He sank to a stool. “God bless her and her wig, Mama said she wasn’t going to get in the middle.”

Miracle of miracles. Never underestimate the power of blackmail, especially when it involved an old woman’s vanity. “And?”

“And Patti went ballistic for about thirty miles, accusing us of turning her grandmother against her, then cried for another twenty over how cruel and heartless we were.” He looked at Elizabeth with fresh assessment. “Is that how she’s been with you all these years?”

“Only since she could talk,” she replied evenly. “And only when you weren’t around, of course.

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