Shout Her Lovely Name Read Online Free PDF

glass out to Ruby. She took it, smelled the whiskey, and asked for a cocktail straw.
    “Uh-uh. Pour it back, like this.” He threw his head back. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Your turn.”
    She lifted her chin, exposing her neck to the two men, and poured the liquor down her throat. She held back a cough as the whiskey burned its way into her stomach. To hide her watering eyes, she stared at the bar top. A two-dollar bill and a sprinkling of change had been laminated there. She remembered digging at the coins with her fingernail as a child, totaling up the two dollars and forty-three cents in her head every time her father brought her in. It had seemed a tremendous waste. Her legs began to tingle, her eyes cleared, and she smiled.
    “How about a roll of nickels?” Teddy peeled a twenty off his money clip and slapped it down. Once Milton complied, he stripped the wrapper from the nickels in one long piece, stacked them in two piles like poker chips, and passed one stack to Ruby. “Let’s spin for shots.”
    “We play word games at school,” Ruby said.
    Teddy snapped a nickel between his finger and the thumb. The coin caught the light, flickered as it spun. “Of course you do,” he said. “I’d expect word games at college.”
    “I mean tongue twisters. One-red-hen. Two-cute-ducks. You know. I-slit-six-sheets. Seven-sexy-Siamese-sailors. Eight-enormous-elephants. Nine-cunning-runts. When you mess up, you have to drink.”
    Her father raised his eyebrows and expertly spun a second nickel without taking his gaze off Ruby. “This is how we play down here.”
    She nodded and pinched her own coin. It wobbled, never hit its rim, then fell flat.
    “Drink up, Jewel.”
    Again she gulped. Again her legs and the back of her eyes were flooded with heat. Milton set the bottle in front of them. The tongue twisters were easy. Seated on the sprung couch on the back porch of the fraternity house, her legs bare in her sundress, her friends charmed and laughing beside her, she’d roll them out, crisp and correct every time, then drink anyway.
    “You can learn this,” her father told her. He pressed his hand around her fingers, showed her how to position the nickel and then snap, as if she were calling over Milton.
    She snapped the coin free and it careened in a wide arc on the bar. When it came to rest her father shook his head. “You got me that time.” He slapped her on the back, slammed down his second. They were matched, shot for shot.
    “What’re you learning at that college of yours?” Milton wiped the bar in front of her.
    “I’m studying education.”
    “Here’s to elevating the young.” Milton raised his beer.
    “I keep telling her to elevate higher.” Her father dug his fingers into his tobacco pouch and then filled his pipe. He offered to roll her a cigarette.
    “No, thanks, Daddy.” She took a pack from her pocketbook and tapped it on the inside of her wrist three times. “I’ve got my own.” She wrapped her lips around a single filter in the pack, extracted it slowly. She’d perfected the gesture, always taking enough time for a boy to retrieve a match or lighter before she held the cigarette expectantly.
    “Menthols?” her father asked.
    She offered one to Milton and he took it and lit a match for both of them. “Sweet. She’s got taste.”
    Teddy scoffed. “Fancy-ass cigarettes do not equal taste. You ever hear what she named her pets? Queenie. Snowball. No imagination.”
    “Mom liked them.”
    “Thank God I was there to mix things up.”
    She laughed. “Mix things up? You renamed every one of those strays Sufchick.”
    Teddy nodded at Milton. It was true. “Hell if I know what it means.”
    “They loved you too,” Ruby said. “They’d always come.”
    “I have that effect on puppies and women.” He tried to ruffle Ruby’s hair and she dodged his reach.
    “Damn if it isn’t true.” Milton laughed, nodding his head.
    Ruby rolled her eyes and propped her chin in