Flying Shoes by Lisa Howorth Read Free Book Online Page B

scent in her daughter’s room, too. “I thought you were just poaching my lavender.”
    “Right, Mom. Like I would really want to smell like you.”
    “What was I thinking?” her mother had lightly replied. It never paid to take a daughter’s insults seriously.
    Evagreen finished straightening in Eliza’s and William’s rooms and very casually cleaned their bathroom. The children’s environment was a mixture of filth and persnickety hygiene. Socks could be worn for days, hair and toothpaste slobber could coat the tub and sink, boogers could be wiped on the corner of the bed sheets, William even had what he thought was a secret booger crop on his wall, but yet each child had to have a clean towel every day, and in Eliza’s case two: one just for a hair turban. Despite what she perceived to be a spoiled upbringing, Evagreen felt a strong, if not deep, affection for the two Thornton children and blamed their shortcomings and flaws on Mary Byrd. “Don’t go to church, that’s why. Animals live in the house, eat and sleep on the table, the chair, everwhere. Things be pile up all over.” There was a long, long litany of cause-and-effect about the Thorntons—at least this generation—that Evagreen recited to herself every Thursday. Basically it came down to how far white people had fallen, and how foolishly they brought so many of their problems all on themselves.
    With her own family, her own four children, Evagreen had been strict to the point of military: church, school, after-school jobs, college. She and L. Q. were there for them in the mornings, after school, and at night, even though it meant L. Q. had to take the graveyard shift at Chambers Stove. Maybe “The Dream” hadn’t quite been theirs, but it sure was going to be those kids’. No doubt.
    Evagreen had been cleaning house for Mary Byrd and Charles since they married, and she was something of a legacy. Her Auntee Rosie had taken care of Charles’s old great-aunt Rosalie for most of Rosalie’s spinsterhood, the two becoming like an old married couple as their years together totted up. Totally in tune with one another’s personalities and foibles and tricks, and united against outside interference, they became a formidable two-headed beast, not to be taken lightly or for granted. The two roses: a thorny totem of the Old South. Occasionally there would be a falling-out. When Rosalie’s health began to flag, they almost broke up over Rosie’s desperate attempt to trick Rosalie into eating. After exhausting every nourishing excitement she could think up or cook, Rosie had offered Rosalie ants on a log—celery sticks slathered with peanut butter and studded with raisins, the heinous “salad” of elementary school lunches—and this had been such a grievous affront to Rosalie’s sophisticated palate that she had rallied and regained strength out of sheer indignation, a response that Rosie had probably anticipated. The two didn’t speak for weeks. When Rosie’s family asked why she tolerated Miss Rosalie’s uncalled-for wrath, Rosie only replied with a wink, “That all right. Ever mornin’ I spits in her coffee.” They were much more like Gertrude and Alice than Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy. In fact, they were both more like Alice B. Toklas: small, sinewy, dark, and prickly as mock orange.
    Evagreen had a lot of her Auntee Rosie in her. Mary Byrd, someone from away who had just married in, with no breeding, no idea of how things worked in an old family in a small Mississippi town, did not know her place, was never going to measure up to the examples set by the women in the Thornton family, most notably Charles’s sainted mother, Lydia—everyone called her Liddie—and her sister, Evelyn. Evagreen knew that Mary Byrd knew the truth of the matter, too. Didn’t count that she was from Virginia; as far as Evagreen was concerned, anything north of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama was north . Even Georgia. “Atlanta full of gangster trash,