Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

that the way to a man’s heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he’s busy picking them up, they’re squirming in through a back window. My cousin Clarice would have had him on his knees by now, trying to peel her a grape. But somehow I missed those classes in girl school, or I didn’t get the gene.
    I had to leave for my Joyce seminar, but as soon as I got back to my office, I tried to get Burr on his cell. More voice mail. I gave up on talking to him directly and decided to call his mama.

    I met Burr’s mother long before I met him. He was living eleven hours away in Ithaca when I moved up north. I didn’t know a soul, having picked Chicago because it was the farthest place from Possett that had offered me a full scholarship.
    I really don’t recommend moving from rural Alabama to a major Yankee city in one great bounding leap. It’s like picking up a prairie dog and dropping him into the Pacific. Welcome to your new environment. I had nothing in common with my fellow students. They were interested in getting fake IDs and laid. I was interested in a 4.0 GPA and a job.
    And it wasn’t only that I didn’t make friends. Everything was so radically different. The looming buildings, the cars in orderly lines on both sides of every street, the streets laid out like a grid.
    Everything marched in straight lines, all sharp corners and hard edges. There were no curves or hills, no restful place to put your eye for even a moment. Even the people seemed linear. Walking the downtown streets, they all moved as if they were carrying a donor heart in their lunch box. No one smiled at me, and no one made eye contact. If I smiled at them, they sped up and raced past as if I were mentally ill. They spoke in hard staccato voices that shot words like bullets.
    I told myself Chicago was exciting and fast-paced. I told myself it had a stark urban beauty. I told myself that before I broke my word to God and went back to Alabama with my tail between my legs, I would drink a Clorox cocktail while leaping off the Sears Tower.
    I met Burr’s mother in the Wal-Mart. Back in Possett, going to the Wal-Mart over in Fruiton was a huge expedition. The whole family went. You stayed for hours. You knew half the people there and stopped every other aisle to have a long chat about Fat Agnes’s festering leg wound or Mrs. Mott’s squirrel infestation.

    In Chicago, I was living for my Sunday and Wednesday phone conversations with my family. But in between the calls, when I became unbearably lonely, I would head to a nearby Wal-Mart. I would wander the aisles, touching things, having imaginary conversations with people from home, relatives or family friends. I talked to everyone, especially Clarice. I even manufactured argu-ments with people I had never liked much or at all—even my dead asshole grampa seemed like a touchstone.
    I was standing in the ladies’ department with my imaginary aunt Florence. As I debated between a blue sweater and a green one, Aunt Florence spoke up: “Honey, you want the blue. That green’ll make you look bilious.”
    I stood blinking stupidly. I had said plenty of things to my imaginary aunt Florence, but she had never answered me aloud before. And I had never in my life heard Flo speak in such a sweet, cozy tone.
    I looked up and saw Burr’s mother smiling kindly at me. She had full cheeks, motherly-looking cheeks, like downy brown pillows. Her eyes were a warm golden brown, about two shades lighter than her skin. Her face was unlined, but her features had that soft, blurred look some women get as they age, and her bun was streaked with white. She had on a floral-print dress. A church-lady dress. Her voice had a mild, almost Southern slur to it.
    I burst into tears.
    “Oh, honey,” she said, but I just shook my head at her. I dropped the sweaters on the floor and put my hands over my face and sobbed into them. I realized this was not sane behavior, and tried