Temple Secrets: Southern Humorous Fiction: (New for 2015) For Lovers of Southern Authors and Southern Novels Read Online Free PDF

diets, Queenie thought at the time, as she held the bucket of bones and smiled back at Colonel Sanders’ emblazoned image. If Iris keeps this up, hardening of the arteries may take her out, but Queenie’s not so sure she has the fortitude to wait for natural causes. Although violence isn’t really in her nature.
     
    Her hair relaxed and styled and all the latest gossip discussed—most of which has to do with the Temple Book of Secrets —Queenie puts the charge on Iris’s bill and waits outside, fanning herself with a real estate flyer pulled from the box in front of the beauty shop. Queenie has only seen the Temple Book of Secrets twice, both times while in Oscar’s office before the ledger was moved to the safety deposit box. No matter how much Queenie begged, Oscar refused to let her look at it, saying Iris would kill him, which she probably would have. The book was kept in the bottom left hand desk drawer that locked with a key Oscar kept on his key chain. It was moved to the bank vault a few years after his death.
    Within minutes, the shiny black Lincoln rounds the corner, rolls over the sidewalk and hits a green trash can that bounces off a silver Toyota wagon before coming to rest at the north end of the parking lot.
    “Good lord, this woman is an accident waiting to happen,”Queenie mutters.
    Queenie is a very good driver herself. Oscar, Iris’s husband, taught her when she was sixteen in an equally big Lincoln Continental. In exchange for the driving lessons, she agreed to climb into the back seat with him and show him her breasts. At the time, this gesture seemed a small price to pay for use of the Temple cars. Of course this is a secret I doubt ever made it into Iris’s precious book . But there are others that might have. She wishes now she had caught a glimpse of that secret book, but Iris keeps the key to the deposit box locked up, too.
    If Queenie’s own secrets are revealed in the classifieds she might be looking for a new place to live. She gulps with the thought. While some southerners follow the motto: What would Jesus do ?—seen on car bumper stickers as W.W.J.D?— Queenie is more prone to ask W.W. O .D.? What would Oprah do? Having watched nearly every episode of Oprah since the early 90s, Queenie’s best guess is that her hero would put a team of lawyers to work on it. Unfortunately, Queenie doesn’t have that kind of money.
    The Town Car rounds the final corner and veers in Queenie’s direction as if Iris is playing a game of geriatric “chicken.” Queenie debates whether to jump aside, but decides to hold her ground.
    “Just try it, old lady,” Queenie says, her teeth gritted in determination. She locks her ample knees in place, grateful she has some substance to her. “If it’s my fate to go to the Great Beyond at the hand of that smelly bitch, then so be it,” she adds. “But I refuse to be the first one to flinch.”
    The Lincoln lurches twice before screeching to a halt, and then stops only inches away from Queenie. So close that heat drifts from the engine and further relaxes her hair. Queenie gets inside and slams the door while Iris’s wrinkled lips glisten in the sunlight from her latest rendezvous with the Colonel. The grease relaxes her face like a kind of Botox injection while the smell of his secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices permeates the closed car.
    After several attempts, Iris coerces the Town Car into drive and hits the curb three times before reaching the main road, causing a family of four to frantically scatter into the good hands of an Allstate Insurance office.
    “God in heaven!” Queenie shrieks. “Watch where you’re going.”
    “Keep your commandments to yourself,” Iris says with a sneer, as she gracefully raises one hip to expel another one for the record books.
     
    On the slow ride home, instead of worrying what secrets of hers might end up in the newspaper—a legitimate concern—Queenie entertains herself by daydreaming of Iris