Backseat Saints Read Online Free PDF

dishes. I took off for the car at a dead run.

CHAPTER

2
    I BLAMED THAT AIRPORT gypsy. I tried to kill Thom Grandee because she’d told me it was him or me. She’d urged me to choose
     him. I don’t know how long she’d been lurking around in Amarillo; I caught her just as she was leaving. If Mrs. Fancy hadn’t
     asked me to drive her to the airport, the gypsy would have left town without me ever knowing she was here, alive and chock-full
     of dire pronouncements. The airport trip was like that nail that dropped the shoe that lamed the horse that lost the battle.
     If I hadn’t taken Mrs. Fancy, I never would have been laying for my husband in the woods.
    Mrs. Fancy was my next-door neighbor, and her baking pans had been on a mission to make me go up a dress size since the day
     Thom and I had moved into the house. She’d come by with a muffin basket, and when she’d handed it to me, she’d taken aholt
     of a piece of my arm and breathed up in my face, saying, “It’s so nice to see young folks moving back into the neighborhood!”
     She had puppy breath and a pincery grip. Thom had gotten rid of her as fast as possible, and then I’d leaned against our closed
     front door, laughing while Thom pretended to nail it shut.
    But that didn’t stop her from tottering back across the narrow strip of lawn, bringing me baked goods and small talk. She
     showedme how to feed my sick forsythia bush, and it came back the next spring blooming brighter than ever. She seemed to understand
     immediately that she shouldn’t come by when Thom was home. The first time she saw my arm in a sling, she asked, but only the
     first time. She accepted my explanation that I’d tripped in the dark with a long blink and a tutting noise. Then she’d made
     the chewy brownies she’d discovered were my favorite, and she never asked again. Before we’d lived there a year, I’d grown
     a taste for both her pastries and her undemanding friendship. I found myself crossing that strip of lawn almost as often as
     she did, carrying homemade lemonade or a pot of flavored coffee. She was my little secret.
    Last week she’d come to my porch with a covered plate in one powder-dry paw, asking for a lift to the airport so she could
     go see her new grandbaby. “My last grandbaby,” she called him. She’d smiled at me, and the skin around her eyes had looked
     like ancient paper, so folded and creased that it might have been used to make a hundred different origami cranes.
    “I’d love to drive you,” I’d said, and she’d smoothed a strand of hair out of my eyes and gone home, leaving me with five
     thousand pepper-jacked calories and a Tuesday so overbooked that I was going to have to hire a neighborhood girl to go pee
     for me.
    My plan was to go on my run, grab Mrs. Fancy, drive like a cocaine-addled hell bat to the airport, hurl her and her bags out
     as I slowed down in the drop-off lane, then do an Olympic-speed grocery store sprint and get a dinner going in the Crock-Pot
     before I jumped in the shower and headed in to work a shift for Thom’s daddy. I ran the cash register at his main store most
     weekday afternoons, while Joe Grandee sat on his stool by the door to the offices and watched me with his gaze set low, a
     smolder on my hips.
    Last week he’d said to me, “It wouldn’t hurt business any if you took that blouse down a button, sugar,” just as if my husband
     wasn’t on the phone with a vendor not five feet away.
    Even when Thom came over, Joe didn’t stop looking at me like I was hot cornbread, buttered up and dripping honey. He elbowedThom and said, “Knowing guns like she does, I bet your wife could outsell my best floor man if she got out from behind the
     counter in that tight blue skirt.”
    A muscle jumped in Thom’s cheek, but Joe was too busy ogling me to notice. He lumbered off to the back to get a Coke. I smiled
     at Thom and said, “Sales out the ass, he means,” to lighten up the mood.
    Thom only