Life Without You by Liesel Schmidt Read Free Book Online Page A

face as sober as possible, even though I felt a smile creeping its way in. Some things never changed, and those were things that were reassuring beyond expression.
    “Nope. I’ll tell you who is, though,” he said, the wrinkles of his wizened face shifting as his expression became one of wide-eyed incredulity. “Walt. Old fart,” he panned, not even waiting for me to guess.
    I felt my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “
Walt
bet on the race?” I squeaked.
    “Not on
this
race, maybe,” Grandpa said, shaking his head as he spoke. “He and Harry have started betting on them, though; and last week those two fools lost their shirts in a bet they had going with two of the boys down at the church.”
    “Say what?” I knew I sounded stupefied, but truth be told, I was. There was really no other word for it.
    Especially knowing Walt. And Harry. The two brothers had been in my grandparents’ circle of friends for more than fifty years, so I had no memories of a summer passing without them in it. In fact, for as long as I could remember, I’d always called them Uncle Walt and Uncle Harry. I’d gone through much of my childhood thinking they must have been blood relatives.
    Silly, perhaps, since the two men were light-skinned African-Americans, but with a family tree as odd as mine, you never knew exactly where one branch might lead. And Lord, if there weren’t things buried deep in family histories that no one ever talked about. They just were. And, as inconceivable as they might have actually been, some things were just glossed over.
    Like mom’s cousin Jean, who was three months “premature.” ’Cause goodness knows, her mama walked down that aisle a virgin, pure as the driven snow. It didn’t matter that Jean weighed a healthy eight pounds when she was born. Nope. That cute little butterball of blondness was born
three months early
.
    Also a subject never raised at the dinner table was the fact that Great Uncle Billy was looking mighty chipper in the months before he died. No one ever talked about that one, no ma’am. His buxom twenty-five-year-old home healthcare worker wasn’t responsible for that in
any way
. It didn’t matter that no one had ever heard of the company she worked for, and that Uncle Billy’s buddies had knocked on his door one day with her in tow—looking mighty professional in thigh-high hooker boots and a skintight nurse’s uniform. The minute the bubble she’d just blown into her bright pink Bubble Yum bubblegum popped and Billy could see the face that went along with the bosoms, she was hired. She was his angel from heaven, bless her heart. She ministered to him in his last days and eased his passing.
    Uh-huh.
    And now, she was mourning his loss just like the rest of us. Only she was doing it from somewhere on a beach in St. Thomas.
    But I digress.
    “Since when do Harry and Walt bet on races? Or anything?” I demanded.
    Grandpa shook his head, obviously aggrieved. “Since Evelyn died and took Walt’s sense with her. Now he and Harry are running around acting like idiots. Doing things neither one of ’em would’ve done when she was alive. Jackasses,” he spat.
    “Grandpa!”
    He shot me a look. “What? It’s true.”
    “Still.” I paused, studying the ceiling. “Is there something to worry about with those two?” I asked quietly.
    I saw him shaking his head out of the corner of my eye. “Worry? No. They’ll come to their senses after they lose enough times.”
    “Let’s hope so.”
    “She’s only been gone for a few months,” Grandpa said. “They’ll come to their senses,” he said again, a little more quietly this time.
    “Don’t we all,” I whispered, not taking my eyes from the ceiling. “Don’t we all.”
    I woke up drooling thirty minutes later, startled by a warm hand on my cheek. Grandpa’s hand, gnarled with age and peppered with liver spots. A Band-Aid was wrapped around the knuckle of his left index finger, covering a cut he’d gotten earlier in