Doing It at the Dixie Dew Read Online Free PDF

the best,” he said.
    And certainly the most modest in the business, I wanted to add but didn’t.
    Scott had made the renovating a project, a challenge, a puzzle to solve. Like Miss Lavinia’s death.
    Surely Miss Lavinia had not been in any pain. Surely she would have cried out, called to me for help, tried to come downstairs. I hoped Miss Lavinia Lovingood died a simple, good and natural death. Even Ed Eikenberry said it looked that way, but he wouldn’t know for sure until the autopsy came back from Chapel Hill. Probably Thursday or Friday. Meanwhile plans for her services were in progress, full swing.
    Like Mama Alice always said, this town turned out for a funeral. And they surely did for my grandmother’s six months ago. Police Chief Ossie DelGardo, the hearse, family cars, funeral procession, even if it was only five blocks from any church in town to Littleboro Cemetery. Bruce Beckner, his assistant (who was also the rest of the Littleboro Police Department), stood at the courthouse square, hat held over his chest, and stopped traffic for the funeral. Anyone from out of town would think it showed respect. How wonderful this remaining bit of Americana, this little town keeping a quaint custom long after big cities raced past and forgot it. Truth was, Ossie DelGardo and Bruce Beckner didn’t have one earthly thing else to do but drive around in their respective cars and confer at Will’s Bar-B-Que west of town, where the hickory logs were split and stacked tall as a fence behind it and the little pink pig’s four neon feet never stopped running. Nor did the scented smoke stop permeating the town, sunup to sundown, six days a week.
    Miss Lavinia had paid for three days. I would have to refund two days to her estate, wherever that was. Miss Lavinia, I wanted to say, wherever you are, couldn’t you have waited until your three days were up, then gone somewhere else to do it?
    Do it, I thought. That sounded like sex. In high school and college you were asked, “Did you do it ?” And everyone knew which girls “did it, ” which couples were “doing it. ”
    Miss Lavinia didn’t do it . She died. And she didn’t have any choice in the matter. Or did she? The real question was, why had she come back to Littleboro at all? And what the heck did those two little cryptic words on her note mean?
    It was so strange. All of this. Strange and unsettling. Maybe coming back to Littleboro wasn’t the right thing to do at this point in my life. Maybe all this was taking my life in some direction I didn’t want to go.

Chapter Three
    I grabbed my old plaid windbreaker from the hook on the back porch and walked down Main Street to Littleboro Cemetery. Back at the house I knew the phone was ringing, people were in and out. Before I’d left, one guest called to cancel. I couldn’t help but wonder if he really had a last-minute change of plans or if the news of Miss Lovingood’s demise had already traveled two hundred miles. And if so, how much farther would it go? Bad news always wore winged shoes. And gossip danced with taps on its heels.
    â€œGo,” Ida Plum said. “You need some fresh air. I’ll hold the fort. Mind the store. Tend the shop … whatever.” She waved me away with her dust cloth. The vacuum cleaner stood behind her like a retired soldier, worn but still staunch. Mama Alice’s stalwart old Hoover, its burgundy bag of a paunch faded as damask. Its motor sounded like gravel in a blender.
    I walked down Main Street. Verna Crowell’s lilac bushes were lit with lavender candles. I drew in the deep blue smell. The old lilacs were thick as a hedge behind Verna’s wrought-iron fence, and the fence was so rusted and sprawled you had to know it was there to see it. Something moved behind the curtains at one of the windows. Verna? Or her darn rabbit, Robert Redford? Sometimes he hopped onto a chair and sat looking out,