Necessary Lies by Janice Daugharty

Author:Janice Daugharty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks Inc.
Published: 2019-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

WAITING FOR NIGHT church to start, Cliffie sat in her usual pew and fanned with a cardboard hand fan, compliments of Roper’s Funeral Home, Jasper, Florida—” You have our deepest sympathy.” Each flutter of air passing over her like warm water. In science class, she’d learned that exerting energy makes you hotter. She fanned anyway.

She wished she could get up and leave, but she was too tired, too afraid. Her jaw felt locked, she itched all over, and the baby was a steady rolling reminder of why she had to stay put and see to the end this endless day. It seemed like a week. She had to keep reminding herself that things were progressing, that time, with the progress of the lazy sun, kept moving.

Preaching would start soon. The sun would set. Cliffie would watch through the two windows over the pulpit to see it sink behind the tilted tombstones in the cemetery. Then night. Then morning. Then the bus bound for Fort Bragg. The plan seemed so simple stacked like that, but time got in the way, time measured by minutes ticking off in her head, along with everybody waiting to thwart the plan.

Mary Helen came in and sat behind her.

Cliffie could feel eyes on the back of her neck. She turned just enough to see Mary Helen’s face, red and puffy, shiny from crying.

All afternoon, she’d been boo-hooing and coughing in the bedroom, skipping dinner and supper, while Cliffie sat at the table with the rest of the family, straining to act normal in the abnormal quiet. Maude and Pappy Ocain had eaten both meals bowed over their plates while the children nibbled and worried over Mary Helen’s choke-and-cry act. Her pain had given Cliffie great pleasure.

Gave her pleasure now. Because she took Mary Helen’s crying to mean she’d given up. Cliffie knew she’d be rubbing it in, but she would like nothing better than to slip Roy Harris’s ring on her finger and scratch the back of her head for Mary Helen to see. But Cliffie couldn’t afford to rub it in yet—the wind, static now, could still change. Besides, Roy Harris had warned her not to wear his ring because somebody might catch on that he, and not Brother Leroy, was the daddy of her baby.

SO FAR, BROTHER Leroy hadn’t denied anything. What a fool, Cliffie thought, glad fools were abundant, which made things so much simpler for smart people like her and Roy Harris. She smiled, knowing that the thought like the smile was fake: she ached all over just thinking about what she’d done to Brother Leroy and his family, how disappointed Pappy Ocain would be when he found out the truth.

Mary Helen sniffled and scraped a songbook from the rack at Cliffie’s back. Her crying had graduated to mewing, exhausting in puffs through her nose.

Separating herself from the racket behind, Cliffie thought about Roy Harris’s prompting that morning in Aunt Teat’s yard. If she knew what was good for her, she’d make the lie stick.

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