Step-Ball-Change by Jeanne Ray Read Free Book Online Page B

nodded and picked up the dog around the middle. She carried it with her arms stretched out in front of her as if it was something she was in a hurry to get into the wash. Stamp seemed to have no sense that he was off the ground. His legs still pulsed as if he were hopping. He barked at the men in the truck until Woodrow came into view, and then he barked at Woodrow again briefly until Kay took him down the hall, at which point he started barking at Mr. Kelly, who was just coming in with the vacuum. Mr. Kelly, a short, heavyset man in his fifties, pressed himself hard against the wall to give Kay and the dog as wide a passage as was possible. Kay opened the door to her old bedroom, where Taffy would be staying, pitched in the dog, and slammed the door.
    “You don’t have to throw him,” Taffy said to Kay. “It works perfectly well to just set him down on the floor.”
    Kay was a lawyer. She was capable of controlling herself when she had to, but I could see the muscles working in her jaw, a gene she had picked up from her father. “Mr. Kelly, Mr. Woodrow, this is my aunt, Taffy Bishop from Atlanta.”
    “I thought that dog was from Atlanta,” Woodrow said.
    “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Mr. Kelly said in a weak voice.
    “Pleased to meet you,” Woodrow said.
    Taffy nodded at them and then turned to me. “Are you adding on to the house?”
    “Well, that’s how it started.”
    “I’m going to go on down to the basement and have a look at those pipes,” Mr. Kelly said, taking a red bandanna out of his pocket and wiping down his large expanse of forehead. “That dog doesn’t go down to the basement, does he?”
    “Never,” Taffy said.
    Mr. Kelly left the vacuum in the middle of the hall and made a quick exit. He wanted to get away from us, all of us. He would clearly be more comfortable underground.
    “I suppose I should be getting back to work myself,” Woodrow said. He turned to Kay. He was hoping to calm her down. “We’ll talk more about the dresses later. I just want you to be sure and pick something before I finish the job.”
    “Mother’s right. We’ve got plenty of time.”
    Woodrow nodded and left the kitchen. He was so tall and thin, so graceful that I always thought he could have been a dancer. He had once confided in me that even in his early sixties he was still plagued by people asking him if he had ever thought of playing professional basketball.
    “The workmen are helping you pick out dresses?” Taffy said.
    “It’s not the workmen,” Kay said, her voice breaking slightly. “It’s Woodrow. Woodrow has very good taste.”
    “He has four daughters,” I said. “He knows a lot about clothes.”
    “There’s something here I’m not getting,” Taffy said.
    “Do you have more luggage?” Kay said. “I could go out and get it for you.”
    “Isn’t George here? There’s too much for you to carry in.”
    How much luggage could there be? “George isn’t going to be home for a while. He’s over at the school.”
    “He’s at law school,” Taffy said, not asking a question but telling me where he was.
    “Actually, right this minute he’s at the dance school.”
    “I’m getting the luggage,” Kay said, clearly dying to leave the room. She was probably wishing that Markus Jones had never shown up this morning. She was wishing that she was still sitting in her office, tapping a pencil against her desk, waiting.
    “Kay, be a dear and let Stamp out of the bedroom.”
    Kay detoured down the hall and we heard her kick open the door before disappearing outside. Stamp came back to his spot like a moth to a floodlight, parking it at the back door and resuming his barking as if he had never been gone at all.
    “Is Kay having problems at work? I don’t remember her having a temper like that.”
    “No, I think work is fine.”
    “Stamp,” Taffy said, raising her voice over the drumbeat of dog bark. “Really, that’s enough.”
    But what was enough for us was not enough for