Sisters and Husbands by Connie Briscoe Read Free Book Online

to stay with Clarence. If y’all don’t come soon, we won’t get to watch the movie together before he
     leaves.”
    Tyrone sighed and said something to Tiffany, then came back on the line. “She’s really looking forward to getting the shoes
     and bag tonight. I promise we won’t be long. I just told her that we had to be home by about six or six-thirty. We should
     be able to eat and watch the video together tonight before Kenny has to turn in.”
    Charmaine glanced at her watch. “Tyrone, I have a hard time seeing that happen. You do realize—”
    “Look, the luggage is coming,” he said, interrupting her. “We’ll work it out. Don’t worry.”
    “But what—”
    “I’ll see you in a bit.”
    “Tyrone.” Charmaine quickly realized that she was talking to no one. He had hung up. She slammed the phone down with all her
     might. “Dammit!” The prayer for patience obviously hadn’t worked.
    She looked around the kitchen despairingly. At that moment she was tempted to dump all the food into the garbage can. After
     all the trouble she had gone through to fix a special meal, Tyrone couldn’t even tell his daughter to come home and eat it.
     All he had to do was say that the shopping spree would have to wait until tomorrow. What was the harm in that? He and Tiffany
     could have had a nice dinner, and watched the video with Kenny and Russell, and then shopped at the mall to their hearts’
     content tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Tiffany would be visiting all summer.
    But Tyrone couldn’t tell his fourteen-year-old daughter no to save his life, even when it inconvenienced others. This whole
     relationship that he had with Tiffany was the strangest thing Charmaine had ever seen. She had noticed it when Tiffany visited
     last summer and again at Christmas. But she hadn’t worried about it much then, thinking that Tiffany visited only a few weeks
     out of the year. Now she was staying much longer. If this was an example of what was to come over the next several weeks,
     it was going to be a long, hard summer.

    Something was bothering Evelyn, and it wasn’t the fact that she was hunched over yanking weeds out of the vegetable garden
     in her backyard. Given the recent dry spell, there weren’t many weeds to pull out. She stood up straight in her Capri jeans,
     stretched her back, and wiped the sweat from her brow as she waited for a warm breeze to hit her face. She had held off doing
     the yardwork until late evening, since it was so hot in the afternoon and she had been in church that morning.
    She walked back toward the house and turned on the sprinkler system set up near the garden. As to what had been nagging her,
     she just couldn’t figure it out. All she knew was that it had something to do with Kevin. They had barely spoken since their
     argument yesterday, even when they were both hanging around the house. But there was nothing unusual about that. In fact,
     that was pretty much how things were between them now. He hung around in the den; she gardened outdoors. He watched television
     in the rec room; she read in the bedroom. When they crossed paths it was as if neither saw the other, for all the words exchanged
     between them.
    She walked to the shed and placed her gardening tools in a basket on the floor. Then she shut the door and locked it. At that
     moment her mind flashed back to the day before when she had first returned home from the bridal fitting and visiting Andre
     in Baltimore. She could remember hearing thumping and running noises coming from the bedroom as she climbed the stairs, and
     when she entered Kevin was closing the door to his walk-in closet. Then she saw Kevin’s shaved head and freaked out, and the
     strange sounds were forgotten. But now she remembered them vividly.
    The only things amiss in the bedroom were Kevin’s suits on the bed, and they wouldn’t explain the weird noises she’d heard.
     She decided to do some sleuthing. It might have been