Clover by Dori Sanders Read Free Book Online Page A

help but think, this woman’s got the smarts to say the right thing at the right time. She may not have wanted me any more than Miss Kenyon wanted me. People don’t like to take on extras. But just maybe, I figured, she had sense enough not to say it. At least not to someone who would carry it back to Gaten.
    Yes, I’d decided, Sara Kate could so fool Gaten if she really wanted to. Poor old Gaten, he just might be simple-mindedenough to believe that if Sara Kate would be happy with Clover, then Clover would be happy with her.
    Everleen brings a platter piled high with fried chicken. “There’s enough food left over to feed an army. Where’s Clover? Her daddy is looking for her.”
    â€œProbably at the top of the stairs listening,” laughs Ruby Helen.
    I sneak out of a dormer window and, when no one is looking, slide down the chinaberry tree at the end of the porch. I need to find my daddy anyway. I got some kind of a bad stomachache and it looks like I’m not the only one.
    Aunt Everleen could certainly tell something was wrong with Sara Kate. “Go find out if there is anything I can do for her, Clover,” she said.
    â€œLeave them alone,” Cousin Lucille said. “When people are in love they want to be alone. Alone behind closed doors.”
    If anybody had looked at Sara Kate right good, they would have known by the way she looked, the way she walked, weakly leaning on Gaten. She certainly was not leaving for any hanky-panky, like they said.
    Gaten and Sara Kate were in his bedroom. They were alone all right. But the door sure wasn’t closed. It was wide open. Sara Kate was lying on the bed, her head propped up on a pillow. Gaten sat on the bed by her side, trying to get her not to talk. But Sara Kate talked anyway. She keptsaying over and over, “I’m so sorry, Gaten, so very sorry. Why did I have to get sick?”
    â€œIt’s because you’ve been eating like a crazy person,” I said. I brought her a foaming glass of Alka-Seltzer, and put a cold damp face cloth on her forehead. My daddy hugged me, and said, “Brilliant.” It wasn’t anything. I’ve done the same thing a thousand times for Aunt Everleen when she gets one of her migraine headaches.
    People are starting to leave. Sara Kate is sitting all alone at the end of a long table. What little lipstick she had on is all gone. She is as white as a sheet. She looks as sick as a dog.
    A dying day brings on dying moods. A cousin up from lowlands is playing his guitar and singing the blues. “Lord, Lord,” he sings, “sometimes I feel like I’m dying.” He kind of looks like he’s dying, with his red eyes and puffy lips that look like somebody put purple lipgloss on them.
    Gideon’s beagle hounds are raising some kind of fuss. Running some poor little rabbit, as hot as it is.
    â€œPick that thing, baby,” Cousin Lucille says to the guitar player. She has put herself together as carefully as a clown. She is wearing every shade of purple I believe there is. I’m surprised her hair isn’t purple. She is wearing a new wig, a frizzed one. The old one caught on fire while she was bending over a gas burner.
    Lucille must have forgotten she’s supposed to be a born-again Christian now and given up dancing. Because now she can’t hold her dancing spirit down. Either that or it’s those chiggers setting her body on fire. She’s been in the blackberry thickets every day.
    Somebody said, “She looks like she’s having a spell the way she’s twisting and carrying on.”
    â€œLeave her alone,” Ruby Helen said. “She lost her husband.” By that she meant, not lost like you can’t find him. Everybody in Round Hill knows where he is. Right in the cemetery under an old stunted pine tree. He’s dead.
    So Lucille danced, all alone in the still twilight. A lonely woman whose body wins out over a guilty heart.