Cottonwood Whispers by Jennifer Erin Valent Read Free Book Online Page A

out to tug my ear affectionately. “I spoke with Gemma. We got an agreement between us so this don’t happen again. Okay? Now that’s all I want to say on the matter.”
    “Okay.” I followed Daddy’s gaze out to the fields where some dried brown leaves had begun to dot the crops. “Intown the other day, I heard Mr. Poe talkin’ about how we ain’t gonna get much rain. He could feel it in his bones, he said.”
    “Well, let’s hope Mr. Poe’s bones are wrong.” He pushed his hat back and leaned down to kiss my cheek. “I’ll see you at dinnertime, Jessilyn.”
    “Yes’r.” I watched him go, his shoulders low. My daddy always walked tall and proud, and when he didn’t, I knew there was trouble around the bend. Hot and dry was a bad prescription for growing crops, and bad crops meant bad earnings for my daddy. I was starting to think hard about that job I’d talked about getting, only this time I was thinking the money might need to be used for family matters instead of for my own.
    My heart was heavy and my face was already dripping with sweat, so I decided to head over to Miss Cleta’s house down the road. She always had sweet tea at the ready, and she’d toss some fruit in it for extra taste. Not to mention that she liked to bake and I could count on getting treats at her house. If I was going to be hot, I might as well be hot and full.
    I found her sitting on her porch, and she clapped her hands the minute she saw me. “I was just tellin’ the Lord I could use some company today,” she hollered. “And here some comes.”
    “Hey there, Miss Cleta,” I called with a wave. “How’ve you been?”
    “Oh, I always get by, Jessilyn Lassiter. You know me.” She waved for me to come into the house, and I followed herinside. To my disappointment, the house didn’t smell like something just out of the oven as it usually did.
    “I’ll tell you, this heat is just the end,” Miss Cleta said as she pulled two glasses from her cupboard. “And don’t you know, I had Elmer Poe stop in yesterday, and he said he sees a drought ahead.”
    “I know. He feels it in his bones.”
    “That’s right. And long as I’ve known that man, he’s never been wrong about the weather. He’s like a walkin’ almanac.” She waved off my attempts to help her and pushed me into one of the kitchen chairs. As she poured the sweet tea, she continued talking. “Now then, that Elmer Poe . . . he ain’t never been quite right since the day he was born. I remember seein’ him a few days after he came into the world. I was only ten years old then, but I could see he weren’t like other babies. Slow, the doctor called him. But that boy’s got a sixth sense, I’m tellin’ you. He knows things other people don’t know. Even gettin’ old and gray as he is, he’s still got more instinct than any of the smart folk in town.”
    “I know he does. That’s why I’m worried. Drought means bad things for my family, you know.”
    She set a glass in front of me and then put one of her blue-veined hands on my shoulder. “Jessilyn, God’s got you in the palm of His hand. Every one of you. He has His eyes on everythin’. You have faith in that, now.”
    I smiled at her, but I wasn’t so sure about what she said. Faith was something my momma and daddy shared. It wassomething I saw in Gemma and in Miss Cleta. But it wasn’t something I had yet come to know for myself.
    I watched her continue to chatter on about this and that while she pulled a tray of small round balls out of the icebox.
    “No-bake cookies,” she told me as she set them in the center of the kitchen table. “It’s the only way I can dabble in the kitchen on days like this.”
    I ate quietly for a minute before I said, “Think my daddy’s pretty worried about a drought.”
    I could always talk easily to Miss Cleta, and I watched her while she took a long sip of sweet tea, contemplating what she would say.
    “Well now,” she began, “seems to me your