Tempest Rising by Diane Mckinney-Whetstone Read Free Book Online

trying to stay with you, butyou seeing something right now that’s got your face fixed like Satan himself is standing behind my head. You might as well as go on and tell me, ’cause you getting ready to explode anyhow. Tell me right now, Sister, tell me slow and soft and easy.”
    “Ness, it’s that old, spiteful woman. The case manager for the daughters. It’s that fat-assed, pipe-mouthed, venom-spewing, Line ’Em Up Larry’s spiteful sister, Vie.”
    Til’s voice went higher and louder with each description of Vie. Ness reached across and put her hands on Til’s knees because now they were going up and down too.
    Then Vie shouted across the room, “You can call me what you want, but you’re a convicted felon, attempted murder, remember, Til, and I’m not placing those girls with you.”
    It seemed to Ness as if the room were moving; it always seemed that way when Til was about to throw a fit. She was a solidly constructed woman, and even now in her sixties she had more muscle mass than fat. Til stood, and Ness did too and grabbed her, to hold her, to talk to her, to calm her down. But Til slipped through Ness’s grasp like lard.
    Now Til was at the counter, banging at it over and over. “You have no right holding a grudge against me over what happened more than thirty years ago,” she yelled. “Everybody knew your brother’s pecker was smashed so no way could he be Clarise’s father, but he kept coming around like some kind of psycho, I was forced to go upside his head. Nowyou better just turn those girls over to my sister and me or I’m gonna do the same thing to you I did to Larry.”
    Vie pressed the security buzzer, laughed out loud in Til’s face, and started backing up toward the door under Lyndon Johnson. “I’m not holding no grudge,” she said, “but I am upholding the law. And as a convicted felon you are unfit, just unfit for those girls to be placed with.”
    A crowd had formed in the room, curiosity seekers walking through the corridor. Even Lyndon Johnson leaned as if to see what the commotion was.
    Ness picked up Til’s coat, which had fallen to the floor. She squeezed the fox-foot collar to her chest. This was bad, very bad. She tried to hold on to her tears and move faster than the police who had just run through the door, dispersed the crowd, and were now heading with determination toward her ranting sister, Til.

2
    T he sun was hanging way back in the sky all feisty and red over Sixtieth Street; it could have been on a different hemisphere but was really just on the other side of town from where Clarise and Finch’s heaven of a house stood. It was afternoon on a chilly Saturday, and the doings were at their height. People flitted in and out of their usual Saturday stop-bys: Baron’s Meat and Poultry, Connie’s Cards ’n’ Gifts, Luke’s Good as New Shoe Repair. They were an eclectic mix. Girlfriends called to each other through the throngs of foot traffic, “Hey now, we got to talk.” Men breezed by other men, slapped hands, said things like “My main man, what you know good?” Bow-tied Muslims waved their newspapers with urgent gestures. “Free your minds,” they called; their voices commingling with the high-pitched humming sounds of tambourine-clapping sanctified women in long skirts and little hats doing a holy dance at the bus stop. The blind man held out his tin cup and jostled with the Jehovah’s Witnesses over prime standing space at the foot of the el. And all through here, the tunes of the Impressions floated from the outturned speakers at the Imperial Skating Rink; they lent smooth cha-cha–able rhythms to the mix as they crooned that everything was all right.
    Then Ramona, the saucer-eyed, butter-toned West Philly head turner, emerged from Miss D’s beauty parlor, where she’d just gotten a hard press, blond streaks, and a French roll tucked up high and neat with fifty hairpins. She caught the “yeah yeah” rhythm of the Impressions’ song, but she