DOUBLE KNOT Read Online Free PDF

company.
    And she sure didn’t like Anderson Cooper’s.
    Anderson saw me and jumped into my arms. We found a seat on the linen sofa opposite
     Mother.
    “Davis.” Mother clasped her hands in a prayer and leaned my way. “I can’t believe
     you snuck a cat on this boat.”
    “It’s not a boat, Mother. It’s a ship.” Anderson tried to get comfortable in my shrinking
     lap, gave up, and settled in beside me.
    “You have a contraband cat on this ship , Davis.”
    “Mother, everyone on this ship thinks I’m Bianca Sanders.”
    “What does that have to do with your cat?”
    “The Bellissimo owns this ship,” I said. “Bianca can sneak her cat onboard if she
     wants to. She sneaked you onboard.”
    “I’m not a house cat, Davis, and you’re going to get us all arrested.”
    “Who’s going to arrest us, Mother?”
    “The Coast Guard. Or the casino. Surely someone will.” She eyeballed me from just
     over the edge of her peeper glasses. “And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t know
     what in the world you were thinking when you named that cat. If I’m going to spend
     the next week with it, you better believe I won’t be calling it Anderson Cooper. I
     am worried sick about what you’ll do when the day comes that you’re responsible for
     naming a human.”
    I stole a sideways look at Fantasy. See?
    She barely batted an eye in acknowledgment. She saw.
    Not only had my mother refused to face her own truth, she had yet to acknowledge mine.
     Which I believed to be the real reason Daddy pitted us together in the middle of the
     Caribbean. So my own mother might notice I’m pregnant.
    “I named her Blizzard, Mother, but it didn’t stick. Because she looks just like Anderson
     Cooper.”
    “Well, Davis, that’s ridiculous.”
    If I had a nickel.
    “And before this boat drives off—” Mother was on a roll, “—you call Bradley and have
     him come get your cat or I will. Either me or that cat is getting off this boat before
     it leaves.”
    “Mother, it’s a ship, Bradley’s on his way to China, and Anderson is deaf.”
    “So you say.”
    “She’s stone cold deaf. She can’t hear a thing.”
    “I understand what deaf is, Davis.”
    “I couldn’t leave her. I can’t leave her. I wasn’t about to leave her. I’m the only
     one she talks to.”
    Fantasy, a mile away on the other end of the long white sofa, whistled a little tune
     and studied the beadboard ceiling.
    “I have news for you, Davis,” my mother said. “That cat doesn’t talk to you.”
    I suspected Anderson couldn’t hear when she was six weeks old. Her veterinarian confirmed
     it. It’s called Waardenburg Syndrome, and it’s something about the gene for deafness
     being located between the genes for white fur and blue eyes on the DNA ropes. The
     hearing gene gets skipped. And she really does look just like Anderson Cooper.
    “Where does Bradley think your cat is?” Mother asked.
    I didn’t answer.
    “He doesn’t know, does he?”
    Mother slept for four months. We had to wake her up to get her in the car, then wake
     her again to get her in the outpatient doors of the Cancer Center in Greenville, Alabama,
     twenty miles from my parents’ home in Pine Apple. She slept the whole time. For four
     months she didn’t wake up until noon, then she was back in bed an hour later. “It’s
     just a stage,” my father said, over and over. “She sleeps all the time because she’s
     feeling a little blue.” (I guess so.) (We all were.) (We were purple-black-blue.)
     Mother finally woke up when her treatments were complete, and boy, did she get up
     on the wrong side of the bed. She woke up mad. Mad at the world. Mad at my father.
     Mad at Donald Trump. Mad at telemarketers. Mad at the weather. Mad at her bosoms.
     Mad at me, which really wasn’t anything new, but she was also mad at my sister Meredith
     who she never got mad at. “It’s a stage,” my father explained. “Her bad temper is
     a defense mechanism.