Five Minutes in Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

across the panting Sidney.
    Jude broke a piece off the tall triangular bush beside her and sniffed it. It smelled like the golden liquid Clementine mopped the kitchen linoleum with. She held it out for Molly to sniff. A hoot owl started calling in the Wildwoods.
    Every time sleep threatened, one poked the other with an elbow and they gazed blearily at the constellations scrolling past overhead. Jude pointed out the Pleiades and told about how the Cherokees used to make would-be braves count the number of stars in the cluster. They discussed the difficulties of needing glasses before glasses had been invented. Then Molly explained that stars were actually light shining through holes in the night sky. Behind the black, everything was white.
    â€œMaybe that’s where your mother is,” said Molly. “Behind the sky.”
    â€œIs that really true?” Jude asked. “Or did you make it up?”
    â€œI can’t remember.”
    At the first hint of dove gray in the eastern sky, as a pale silver sliver of crescent moon arced above the headstones in the cemetery on the hilltop, they turned off the faucet and dragged the hose into Sandy’s parents’ toolshed.
    â€œV ERY FUNNY,” SAID A CE as the two girls pedaled past the abandoned construction site the next morning, purple circles under their eyes like bruises.
    â€œWhat?” asked Molly.
    â€œThat.” Ace pointed to the sea of orange mud where the Commie Killer headquarters had been.
    â€œWhat happened?” asked Molly, blinking her baby blue eyes.
    Jude chewed the inside of her lower lip to keep from grinning.
    â€œYou tell me, pukeface.”
    â€œDid it rain again last night?” asked Jude.
    â€œTell your parents to start saving for your funerals,” said Ace, gazing at them through his opaque black eyes like Sergeant Friday on “Dragnet.”
    J UDE PEDALED LIGHTNING TO HER grandmother’s large white brick house on the next block to welcome her home from her trip to Savannah for a Daughters of the Confederacy convention. “I told your granddaddy,” she once explained to Jude, “if he expected me to leave behind my beautiful colonial Virginia, he’d have to build me a new dwelling place. I wasn’t gonna live out my life in his hillbilly shack.” After constructing his bride’s neo-Georgian mansion and leasing the farmland in the valley to Mr. Starnes, Jude’s grandfather sold off the rest of his family farm for house lots and a golf course. Her grandmother named the resulting development Tidewater Estates. Jude and her father now lived in the “hillbilly shack,” a rambling house of chinked logs built by Jude’s great-grandfather, a half-Cherokee herb doctor.
    Jude remembered removing the knitted mitt from her grandfather’s three wood so that he could tee up in his backyard and drive his golf ball across the river to the first green of the golf course, whose fairways scaled the foothills like a grassy roller-coaster track. Then he descended the cliff to the river’s edge, put his golf bag in a boat, and rowed across the water to continue his game. Having been a left-handed bush league baseball pitcher before his conversion to medicine, he had a golf swing that was the envy of the county.
    Following her husband’s death the previous year, Jude’s grandmother circled the globe twice on the Queen Elizabeth, sending Jude postcards and dolls from each country. Jude steamed the stamps off the cards and saved them in an album. And she removed the elaborate national costumes from the dolls to amputate limbs and extract organs. Then she stitched the incisions with needles Clementine threaded for her, as she had watched her father do when she went with him on house calls to hill farms.
    Jude mounted the brick steps, white columns on either hand. Standing on tiptoe, she lifted the knocker hanging from the teeth of a huge golden lion head. A row of shiny cars