No Defense Read Online Free PDF

downstairs anyway, LuAnn. I want to
stay here, with you and Jessie.” His hands were outspread in front
of him.
    I clasped his hands in mine and kissed him
lightly on the lips. “A truce?” I offered.
    He kissed me back. “A truce.”
    “Do I look okay?” I asked.
    He took a stray piece of hair and pushed it
into the root of my braid. “Beautiful,” he said, draping his arm
across my shoulder. Together we walked into the reception.
    “A drink might hit the spot,” Eddie said,
turning quickly in the direction of the bar.
    I reached for him and caught his forearm.
“In the middle of the day?” I said. “Don’t, Eddie. You’re cutting
down, remember? You promised.”
    “Come on, LuAnn. I deserve it. You want
Eddie happy?” He grinned and shook his arm free of me, then ordered
a scotch on the rocks. He took a gulp. “You’ll get Eddie
happy.”

 
    CHAPTER
THREE

    After the buffet lunch and the speeches, only
the family and a few friends and guests remained at the Steak
House. It was almost three in the afternoon.
    Jessie lay sleeping across three chairs I’d
pushed together against the wall. Telltale evidence of her Three
Musketeers Bar spotted the front of her white sailor dress. Eddie
and I sat on either end of our daughter, I at her head, he at her
feet, nursing another drink. The rest of the family relaxed at a
nearby table, rehashing the events of the day. Ben and Junior were
off at a comer table, chatting.
    I was so tired from the day’s activities
that I was tempted to push together enough chairs to follow
Jessie’s example, but I knew my swollen body lying there wouldn’t
be a pretty sight. Instead I slipped off my shoes and propped my
swollen feet and ankles up on a chair I’d placed in front of me and
watched my shirt pop up here, then there, in an undulating dance
caused by the twins in motion.
    I don’t know where the babies found the
room, all scrunched up in there, but often when I was very tired
and still, as now, they would go at it. A fist, an elbow, a knee.
Sometimes I simply relaxed and watched the show. Other times I
responded, rubbing whatever was poking out or gently pushing it
back in. It was an odd but satisfying means of communication.
    Their activity brought home, as it sometimes
did, that there were two babies in there, inside me , two
babies who would very soon be Jessie’s brothers or sisters. I knew
this, of course, as an objective fact, but at another level
pregnancy and childbirth seemed too incredible to be true and had
been no less amazing when only Jessie occupied the same space.
After she was born, I would often stare at her for hours, marveling
that she had lived as part of me, that she had grown into Jessie
inside of me. This most common of human experiences seemed at the
same time both preposterous and miraculous.
    My father put down his cigar and lightly
tapped a spoon against his beer glass. His navy jacket was draped
over his chair back, revealing his trademark suspenders. His own
likeness loomed behind him, the green eyes Jessie and I had
inherited from him staring out at us.
    “I imagine y’all are all tired of hearing me
talk, and I’m tired of talking, but I have one more announcement.”
He reached around, pulled some papers out of his inside jacket
pocket, and unfolded them in front of him on the tablecloth. He put
a clean butter knife on the top of the document and a salt shaker
on the bottom to hold it open.
    “I have here the deed to the Tallagumsa
Steak House,” he said.
    I looked at the others, confused at the non
sequitur. What did the deed to the Steak House have to do with the
new courthouse?
    Estelle, who was helping two of the
waitresses bus the cluttered dining tables, caught my eye and
winked at me.
    “And it says here that Mimi and Howard
Bledsoe have sold the Steak House to … “ He cleared his throat.
“Let’s see now, sold it to …”
    He pretended to search the papers for the
name, moving his finger along each line and obviously