Alma's Will by Anel Viz Read Free Book Online

guilt, the feeling it was he who had betrayed them .
    They were both shaking now. "I'll be there with you," Ed whispered. "I promise," he added, clinging to his lover as much for his own comfort as for Cameron's.

Liv

    Liv poured herself a tall glass of lemonade, her third that morning. She'd forgotten how hot Macon could get in summer. Unless the heat affected adults more. The twins and Li'l Eric didn't seem to mind as much, playing out in the back yard. "Hotter'n hell and a helluva lot less comfortable," Daddy used to say. "Thank God for cold beer!" Of course she remembered about the heat; only her body had forgotten how it felt. Had July always been this hot? Maybe those activists were right about global warming.
    She looked out the kitchen window to check on the children before returning to the pile of half-packed boxes in the living room. She saw that one of those men next door—the white man, Franklin—had come out to work in his garden. No harm in that other than his apparel: a sleeveless tee-shirt and one of those skimpy Speedos men like him liked to wear. He wasn't paying them any attention, and they'd been warned not to talk to those neighbors. That black cat of her mother's, the one she called Ronnie, lay curled up in the sun. How fitting that that cat had attached itself to them!
    The thump-thump of Li'l Eric's ball on the back of the house blended in with the familiar sounds of a Macon summer: flies buzzing, the whirring of the ceiling fans, and the absolute quiet in the street outside on a scorching day. What other physical memories had stayed with her? The sour odor of beer on Daddy's breath and the sweat sticking to his body when he'd hug her close. "You like the feel of a strong man's arms, doncha Princess? Nothin' queer about you!" Her brother, Ronnie. No one ever mentioned his name. Had Daddy been that attentive when he was around? She only remembered wishing for a brother or sister to share in those hugs.
    Now she was sweating like Daddy. Why hadn't Mama put in central air like those men next door? It wouldn't have surprised her to learn it was the heat that killed her. She'd refused an autopsy when the police called, out of consideration for the doctor who'd have to perform it. She'd been dead for a week when they found her… and in this heat!
    The heat. She'd have visited more often after Daddy died except for that, she told herself, but only their summers were free since the twins had started school. Christmas was for Eric's family—dozens of people from all over the country, while in Macon there were only Daddy and Mama, and Eric loathed Daddy, loathed him from the very first, even before he got drunk at their wedding. "Thank God for cold beer."
    They'd come home to ask permission to marry. She wasn't quite eighteen yet. She'd gone to Atlanta with a girlfriend to take some secretarial courses so she could land a decent job, and never really came back. She signed up for a course on investments, thinking it would come in handy, but it turned out to be corporate investments and not much use. The instructor, though, was a young man out to earn a little money on the side while he finished up his MBA. Eric—so smart, so worldly. A few weeks into the course she found herself shacked up with him. Then, towards the end of the semester he was offered a good job in Idaho. She figured she'd never see him again. She never expected him to propose. So they went to Macon and he met her father.
    Now she was back home, after all this time. At the Heymers', that is. Who owned this house was up in the air; she was only allowed in to pack up the contents. That much Mama had left her, though she couldn't sell them off yet.
    She remembered her surprise at seeing those two men, Mama's neighbors, there when Evan Marker read them the will. He said they'd helped her with the house after Daddy died. She thought maybe she'd left them a token something to thank them. Some token—the whole damn house, and to turn into a home