Yard War by Taylor Kitchings Read Free Book Online Page B

she let go. Then she dug around and picked up the ones I had hidden. I thought I buried them better than that.
    “Trip Westbrook! Do you want to explain this?”
    One hand was on her hip and one hand was full of broken roses. She was mad, mad, mad.
    “What have I told you about getting into my roses?”
    “Ma’am?”
    “Don’t you act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
    “Well, I, uh—you mean
those
roses?”
    “You are cruisin’ for a bruisin’, young man!”
    “Miz Westbrook,” said Dee. “It wasn’t Trip that…”
    I frowned at him and shook my head. When Mama’s eyes get black like that, you do not want to be the reason. She was the kind of mad she gets when her day has been too busy with errands and projects and meetings, and she needed to lie down and take a nap a long time ago, but people would not let her take a nap and somebody, somebody was going to have to pay for this.
    “He means we don’t exactly know what happened, Mama. We don’t exactly know who broke your roses. We tried to be so careful.”
    “And those you propped up, you might just as well have broken off. They’re not going to make it. Do you exactly know who bent them and then propped them up like that so I wouldn’t notice, instead of telling me honestly what had happened?”
    “Well…well, I was gonna tell you about it as soon as you got home.”
    “Miz Westbrook, the truth is…” Dee still did not understand that he was in danger.
    “The truth is that I did it, Mama. I couldn’t stop running in time and ran in there and accidentally broke them and tried to hide it from you. I’m sorry.”
    She stared at me and you would not have thought that I was her beloved firstborn, you would have thought that I was a redheaded stranger and the punishment didn’t exist that was horrible enough for me, but she would invent it.
    Probably the biggest reason that I’m a good kid is that I’ll do anything not to make Mama that mad. The last time I saw her like this was a few months ago, when I rode on the back of a motorcycle. Daddy always said he would buy me a car when I got to college if I promised never to ride on a motorcycle. Mama told me he had a friend in high school who got killed in a motorcycle wreck, and that’s why he felt so strongly about it. He also said he would pay me a thousand dollars when I was twenty-one if I never touched a cigarette or a beer until then. That part sounds like an easy thousand. But I have always wanted to know what riding motorcycles felt like. Mama and Daddy left for a party one Saturday afternoon, and I was hanging out in the yard and here came Johnny Adcock on his new Yamaha YM1, which he was almost old enough to legally ride. He said he would take me around the block.
    I would see what it felt like and never do it again. Just around the block. It wasn’t like I was driving it myself. Anyway, who would ever find out? So I got on the back and hung on to Johnny, and we took off around the corner. He opened it up all the way down Waynedale, and I was so happy I had made this decision.
    Then, soon as we turned back onto Oak Lane Drive, even though they weren’t supposed to be home until late, here came Mama and Daddy. I ducked as low behind Johnny as I could, but it was too late. They were standing in the driveway, waiting for me. Mama had forgotten a cheese ball for the party. So thanks to that cheese ball, I got into the worst trouble I’d ever been in and finally understood what God was trying to tell me:
“You will never get away with anything.”
    Now Mama turned before she went back inside and shook the dead roses at me: “When Meemaw leaves, you and I are going to improve your understanding of ‘yard rules’ and what happens to those who violate them.”
    The chances of me ever playing football in the front yard again didn’t look very good. Or of ever being let out of my room again.
    I decided to stay outside until Meemaw came. Dee went back to raking, and we