Isle of Palms by Dorothea Benton Frank Read Free Book Online

obvious, even to me, that this wasn’t an ordinary death or else the police wouldn’t have taken that man away to jail. My house was probably still crawling with the police. I didn’t know because nobody was telling me anything. I was afraid to ask.
    No. This couldn’t be fixed. Was there anyone on this earth who could possibly have the nerve to believe they could make things right for me and for my daddy? As a matter of fact, it seemed that yes, there was. Daddy’s mother, that’s who. Just when I thought they were shutting me out completely, Daddy said, “My mother is coming tomorrow.”
    Grandmother Violet, who preferred to be called Grandmother—not Nana, not Grandmomma or Mama or Grandma, but Grandmother—had been called in Estill and given the news. She was coming in the morning. Great, I thought, just when it didn’t seem possible that my situation could get worse.
    My grandmother was the most unpleasant woman I ever knew. She found fault with everyone and everything. She had never liked my mother either, calling her a gold-digging nobody whenever she was out of earshot. Adults thought kids didn’t know what was going on, but they did. I heard every single thing she said in our house because she had this unbelievable haunted house voice. When she got upset or laughed too loud, the dogs outside would howl. I’m not kidding either. They did. It wasn’t that I wanted to eavesdrop, it was that the noise she made was near impossible to avoid. Maybe my momma wasn’t from some stuck-up self-made American Dream family like Grandmother’s, but she was a former beauty queen and spoke like a normal person. Besides, if there was any gold around to dig for, I never saw it.
    Maybe, just maybe, Momma being dead would be big and horrible enough to make Grandmother be nice. Inside, I doubted it. I really did.
    All night long, I heard the grown-ups talking about funeral plans. I was brushing my teeth in the hall bathroom with a new toothbrush that was too big for my mouth. I had decided the best thing for me to do was stay out of the crowd, but the door was ajar and I could hear them.
    Our pastor’s wife said our church was going to put together a reception for us. Somebody else was going to make phone calls for Daddy. Daddy’s best friend, another doctor, came in with a brown bag of booze for him and a Barbie for me. He didn’t know what to do for me, he said, but he figured a Barbie might be welcomed by a little girl. Eventually they got around to talking about me and who would take care of me in the afternoons after school.
    A voice drifted from the living room, saying, “Well, you could send her to boarding school.”
    I couldn’t believe my ears. I was standing there wearing my new nightgown and all at once, ranting and raving gushed out of my mouth like I was the Hoover Dam with a drastic leak. I screamed at all of them.
    “Just what’s going on here? What’s going on? Don’t y’all know I’m sick? I threw up tonight! I don’t want to go to boarding school! I have a school and I have to go tomorrow! I didn’t even do my homework!”
    They all stopped and stared down at me, realizing the disaster was too much for me to absorb. I would never forget their faces—embarrassed that they had overlooked me that horrible night. And it was all made worse by the fact that they knew I had seen my momma dead, being carried out from my house. Miss Mavis had been right. I had not needed to be a witness to my mother’s body being put in a bag. I wanted all those people gone from the house that minute.
    There I stood, barefoot, with my toothbrush dripping and hair shot in every which way, looking up at them, them looking down at me. I was as mad as every demon in all of hell. They were pushing Daddy into all kinds of decisions. I wanted to wait and discuss these things with my daddy by myself, the same way we always had. Then, as though someone said Action! , they all began talking again, to each other and to