Dust by Eva Everson (epub e reader .TXT) 📕

distance between them filled with smoke, adding to the overall dinginess of the place. If she looked hard enough, long enough, Cindie would swear she saw it clinging to the walls, adding a coat of gray to what used to be pure white. “Well, aren’t you just all high and mighty? Talking to me about what’s holy.” From somewhere near the middle of the house, a door opened, then closed, followed by another door shutting. “Your brother’s up, I reckon,” Lettie Mae added. “Leticia sleeps to near noon on days she ain’t working.”

“Mama …” Cindie took a deep breath. “Are we going to go at each other all week? Because if we are, I am not bringing Michelle here. I can tell you that much.”

Lettie Mae hoisted herself up, sliding to the end of a cushion that had seen better days years prior, the center of it concave. Unsupportive. Even the flowers in the pattern looked wilted and forlorn. “And just where do you think you’ll go, Priss?”

“I’ll go to Velma’s.” Cindie waltzed over to the end table next to Lettie Mae’s chair, grabbed up the pack of Salems, then pulled one out and lit it with her mother’s Bic. She blew a thin line of smoke before sashaying to the sofa. “She told me I could,” she said, then plopped on it.

“She ain’t said no such a thing.”

Cindie nodded. “Yes, she did.”

“When?”

“Thursday night, when I talked to her on the phone. Told her I was coming home and that I was concerned about how you were going to behave—”

“Me behave?”

“And that’s when she said for me and Michelle to just go out to her and Vernon’s house.”

“I reckon now that you got your own car you think you can just up and do whatever.”

Cindie tapped her cigarette against the edge of a nearby ashtray. The gray-white ashes crumbled over the edge. Part of her deal with Westley was that in addition to getting her set up in Atlanta, he would provide a decent car. Something that wouldn’t break down every five miles. He’d done better than that. “It’s a fine car,” she said, now taunting her mother.

“Ain’t a new one.”

The Fairlane was a few years old, that much was true, but it had barely been used and Westley had insisted that a mechanic give it the okay before he purchased it. Cindie hated the color—some putrid yellow—but the radio and the air conditioner worked so she kept that much of her opinion to herself. “It’s better than anything you ever drove.”

Jacko shuffled in on bare feet. He hadn’t bothered to pull on a shirt or button the rumpled pair of jeans that hung low on his narrow hips. A line of dark hair ran from the opening to his navel. Another formed a V between his breast bones while the hair on his head stuck out in all directions. Chocolate eyes bore the telltale signs of a night of drinking. “Could y’all keep it down, please?” he mumbled. “You could wake the dang dead with all this carrying on.”

Cindie stood and walked over to the young man who had grown at least two, maybe three inches since she’d seen him last. She slipped her hand under his chin as she strained to make eye contact. “You sure tied one on last night, didn’t you, baby brother?”

He jerked away from her. “I need coffee,” he said before ambling to the back of the house.

“Bring me a cup,” Lettie Mae hollered. She ground out the nub of her cigarette. “And you,” she said to Cindie, “leave him alone. He works hard over to the plant. If on a Friday night he wants to go out with his friends, then there ain’t nothing wrong with it.”

Cindie crushed her half-smoked cigarette before stalking after her brother. She found him in the kitchen, two mugs in front of him, pouring coffee from the percolator into the empty one. “Hey,” she said, keeping her voice soft. “Wanna go with me to Velma’s this weekend?” Because, for sure, she wasn’t going to be able to tolerate a whole week at Lettie Mae’s. She hadn’t learned a whole lot in Atlanta yet, but she’d at least learned that much.

He eyed her. “For what?”

“I thought maybe you and Leticia and me and the baby could spend some time with our big sister.” She looked around the room, frowning at the previous night’s dishes still piled in both sinks. The trash overflowing from the can. The Formica table that needed a scrubbing in the worst way. “Don’t you want to get out of this rat trap for a couple of days?” Obviously, since she’d left, the house had gone to the dogs.

Jacko chuckled as he took a sip of black coffee. “You mean get away from Lettie Mae.”

“Come on,” she coaxed. “We’ll have a sibling weekend. We’ll cook out and enjoy Mother Nature and on Sunday we can go listen to Vernon preach. I bet Velma will make a big Sunday dinner afterward … fried chicken … fried okra … you know how much you love her fried okra …”

Jacko’s face lit up as much as humanly possible considering the hangover Cindie felt sure he must be nursing. “Makes Vernon’s hellfire and damnation stuff worth listening to.”

Cindie reached for the second mug of coffee and began fixing it to her mother’s liking. “So, you’ll do it?”

“I think Leticia’s working this afternoon.”

“Yeah, well … I’ve got my own car now. I’ll just drive back to town and pick her up from the café.”

He took another sip as their mother called from the front of the house. “Is someone bringing me my coffee?”

Cindie rolled her eyes and Jacko chuckled again. “I’m coming,” she hollered back. Then, to Jacko, “I’m meeting Westley at the drugstore in about a half hour and then I’ll be back here about a half hour after that … if I’m lucky. That gives you a whole hour to throw some things in a sack so we can