Sugar and Spite Read Online Free PDF

said. “I probably shouldn’t have called you, of all people.”
    She heard Gran sniff a no-nonsense, but still ladylike, sniff on the other end. “Do you really think I don’t know what sort of person Macon is? Of all people, I should know my own son.”
    Savannah toyed with the ribbon on the front of her gown, allowing it to slip between her fingers. Unshed tears began to burn her eyes. She blinked them away. Why should it still hurt after all this time?
    She started to speak, but her throat closed up. As always, Gran filled in the blank. “It’s all right, honey. It’s okay to cry.”
    Savannah cleared the knot out of her throat. “I’m not crying.” But it wasn’t a very convincing denial; even to her own ears, she sounded like a defiant, teary, five-year-old.
    “I didn’t say you were boo-hooing up a storm,” Gran said. “But I could tell you were getting a little weepy on me. And that’s all right. I know my son wasn’t much of a father to you. And your mama… well, she was another story altogether. And things weren’t exactly a picnic for you, the oldest in a family with nine young’uns and no full-time parent to take charge.”
    Savannah flashed back on the mountains of laundry that always needed to be washed, hung on the clothesline, folded, or ironed. The skinned knees, cut fingers, cat scratches, and beestings that had to be cleaned, medicated, and kissed. The endless assembly line of school lunches: stacks of sandwiches, sliced Spam when they could afford it, peanut butter when they couldn’t. Babies crying, kids fussing, the verbal quarrels and the knock-down-drag-outs that had to be refereed. A table with not one, but three extra leaves in it, burdened with plates of fried chicken—one piece per kid—and huge bowls piled high with mashed potatoes. If you truly are what you eat, those children’s bodies must have been ninety percent mashed potatoes.
    But the memories weren’t all tiresome.
    Granny Reid had always sat at the end of that table, saying grace at the beginning, and thanking the Good Lord above for every one of them sitting around it. She had cared for her shiftless son’s children without one word of complaint, making each of them feel as though they had a special, wonderfully warm spot in her heart.
    “I didn’t suffer, Gran,” Savannah said, wishing she could, like the commercial said, reach out and actually touch the precious person on the other end of the phone. “Not one bit. I have no regrets about my childhood… thanks to you.”
    “Me either, sugar. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. You children kept me young long past my youth. And now the grandbabies are doing the same. As long as there’s a youngster in the house, I’m a kid, too.”
    Savannah took a deep breath and snuggled deeper under the satin comforter. “I wish I could be as young tomorrow as you were yesterday, Gran.”
    “Well, of course you do, sugar,” her eighty-five-year-old grandmother replied with Mae West sauciness. “Or half as good-looking.”
     
    * * *
     
    Savannah had just dropped off to sleep when the telephone rang, exploding in her right ear and sending her pulse racing like a scared rabbit’s. She grabbed the receiver, dropped it on the floor, picked it up, and smacked herself on the teeth with the mouthpiece. She could swear she tasted blood.
    “What?” she shouted, ready to kill whoever was calling her at—she squinted at the red, glowing numbers on the bedside clock—1:22 a.m.
    “Van…”
    Savannah didn’t need Gran’s extrasensitive radar to detect the distress in that one word. She sat straight up and flipped on the bedside lamp. “Yeah, Dirk, what’s going on?”
    “It’s Polly.”
    Savannah had a half a second to utter a quick, silent prayer, one that she instinctively knew was pointless.
God, let her be okay. They just had a fight, right? She’s alive, but they just argued and
—
    “She’s dead.”
    Let it be natural causes, or
… “A car