Shine (Short Story) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and pride was a sin, so instead, she just tugged at the bottom of her shorts and scuffed her sneaker on the squeaky polyurethaned floor. It sounded like a chipmunk.
    Maia pushed the button on the stopwatch to get it ready. Ruth put her toe on the red starting line, as close to the inside edge as she could, without cheating.
    “On your mark,” Mr. Yorkey called out.
    “Hey, Ruth?” Maia said quietly.
    “Get set…”
    Ruth twisted her neck.
    “You’re gonna ace this,” Maia said, smiling. “Just run like the KKK is chasing you.”
    “Go!” Mr. Yorkey shouted.
    —
    Last year Granny’s best friend in the world had died of cancer. She and Miz Lonnie had come up north from Mississippi when they were seventeen and had gotten jobs in a factory together and got married a year apart. Miz Lonnie was the sister she’d never had, and at her funeral, Granny wept so hard that she had to be helped out of the church.
    She took to her bed, drinking the medicinal whiskey. An hour later Ruth cracked the door open to make sure she was all right, because it was scary to see someone you were used to envisioning as the very definition of solid break into pieces before your eyes. Granny was sitting on the bed, still in her black lace dress, a shoe box in her lap. Spread all around her were photographs so old that they had wavy edges, with handwritten ink on the back that had turned brown with age. “Baby girl, you come sit with me,” Granny said, and Ruth crawled onto the mattress and tucked herself tight underneath the old woman’s arm.
    Ruth pointed to one scalloped photo. “Is that you, Granny?”
    The picture was of a woman younger than Mama, even, with hair pulled back into a bun and a crisp white shirt tucked into her skirt. She was pointing at the camera and laughing.
    “That’s me,” Granny said. “And look, in the background here, that’s your great-granny.” Ruth looked closer and saw a woman with a pinched mouth standing on the porch in the background, her arms crossed. “She was mad because Lonnie and me, we were always foolin’ around.”
    “Where’s Miz Lonnie?” Ruth asked.
    “On the other side of the camera,” Granny explained. “She had just got it that day, and she said I could be her model.”
    Ruth snuggled closer. Granny smelled of talcum powder and rosewater and Maker’s Mark. “What about this one?” she said, holding up a picture of four austere youths—two young men stiffly holding the elbows of Granny and Miz Lonnie, who wore flower corsages that had been bleached white by the exposure process.
    “Well, that was a church social. Lonnie, she was wild for that boy, but she wasn’t allowed to go on her own, so he brought along a friend as my date. Go figure, I fell hard for him.”
    “That’s Granddaddy?” Ruth asked.
    “No, his name was Jerald. He was the first boy I loved. Granddaddy was the last.”
    They sat on the bed sifting through the entire shoe box, each photograph a memory. Granny talked about creeks she used to swim in with Miz Lonnie and the coonhound her family had that used to attack porcupines. She pointed to a gold cross Ruth’s great-granny wore in one picture, which was the same gold cross Granny had around her neck at that very moment. There was a photo of her and Miz Lonnie in Times Square with old-time cars that Ruth had seen only in movies, and one of Granny pregnant with Mama, holding Miz Lonnie’s toddler son, Abraham, like he was a practice run. Then Ruth found a picture that had gotten wedged in the cardboard at the side. This one, though, wasn’t from Miz Lonnie’s camera. It was a newspaper clipping of a hanged man. “What happened to him?” Ruth asked.
    “The KKK happened to him,” Granny said. She reached for her bottle of whiskey and took another shot. “White men, with their pointy hoods, burning their crosses.” She breathed fire at Ruth, who closed her eyes and held her nose. “They killed him. Lonnie and me, we saw it on the way to school.