Between, Georgia Read Online Free PDF Page A

cannot know you are here. Understand?”
    He nodded at me, and as I took my hand away, I added, “And don’t smile at me.”
    He obediently made his mouth into a straight line, lowering his eyebrows as if taking me seriously. His dirty-blond hair was tousled and flopping in curls over his broad forehead. He looked beautiful, and he knew it. I rolled away from him, onto my side.
    I grabbed the phone off the charger and said into it, “I’m not driving over there today, Bernese.”
    “Who asked you?” she said. “You sound like you’re still sleeping.” Behind me, I could feel Jonno uncoiling, stretching like a big cat and rolling toward me, pressing his naked length against my back. I shoved my elbow at him, but he ignored it and nestled closer. His body felt warm and pliable, and his morning erec-tion was nosing at my thigh.
    I said, “I overslept a little. I have three jobs today, and I need to get going. I can’t leave town and drive down there.”
    “You said that yesterday. But I thought you’d want to know that Stacia’s been up next door pacing since before sunup. I can see her through the window, going back and forth, back and forth, all in a lather. Your mama’s flat miserable.”
    I narrowed my eyes. “If Mama needed me home today, she would have said so. I’m booked solid all week, and I have my court date on Friday. I’m coming Saturday, and Mama knows that.”
    Bernese went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “She spent all day yesterday in her studio, digging around in her boxes of doll heads and humming and pacing and unwrapping and feeling all over the faces and then wrapping them back up and driving everybody rabid-dog crazy. And Genny! She catches your mama’s moods like stomach flu, and I had to stop her from picking fifty times yesterday. This is going to end with her in bed for four days, if not in the hospital.”
    “Give Genny a Xanax,” I said, shoving at Jonno’s legs with my feet. He scooted away from me, but not far. I could still feel his body radiating heat behind me.
    “She won’t take a pill in case your mama chooses a doll head and is ready for her to start sewing the body and clothes. And she’s already into the paranoid part. She wouldn’t eat the apple-sauce I brought her because she said I had probably snuck her a pill in it.”
    “Which I am sure you had!” I said.
    There was a tiny pause, and then Bernese said, “It’s still paranoid for her to think that.”
    “No, Bernese, that’s not paranoid. That’s smart. You know, if you don’t want Mama to be this unhappy and get Genny all riled, you could quit selling off her doll heads.” Jonno started playing itsy-bitsy spider in the space between us, one hand finger-walking down my spine.
    “If you would come over here and help her pick one . . .”
    Bernese said.
    I rolled over onto the spider, pinning it under my back. I gave Jonno a look that could have withered a whole rain forest, but he grinned back at me, the tent in the sheet telling me he was completely unwithered.
    “That’s not going to happen,” I said to Bernese. “There are a finite number of heads. Quit selling them.”
    Even as I said the words, I knew they were futile. Bernese had the artistic sensibilities of a handful of blackberries, and even if she had been gifted in that way, Mama and Genny were a perfectly closed unit of Artist and Craftsman. There had never been room for Bernese inside their doll-making process, so from the time they were young women, she had busied herself finding markets for their products. She’d used the appealingly tragic combination of Mama’s talent, her deafness, and her incipient blindness as a hook. Exploitative, yes. Also effective. After a couple of years of traveling to doll-making and toy conventions on Mama’s behalf, Bernese hooked up with an Atlanta lawyer, Isaac Davids, and together they negotiated a huge contract with Cordova Toys.
    Cordova still mass-produced a popular line of dollhouse dolls that