The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion Read Online Free PDF Page A

especially painful. She had always been a little on the chunky side, and unlike the twins and Carter, who had inherited Lenore’s perfect complexion, she’d had terrible acne all through high school. Each new pimple brought on a new set of histrionics. Almost every afternoon, Dee Dee would come home from school, run to her room, and fling herself across her bed in tears, because some boy hadn’t spoken to her or she hadn’t been invited to some party or something equally as devastating. Sookie had spent hours sitting with her, holding her hand, while she cried and sobbed about how terrible her life was. “Oh, Mother,” she would sob. “You just don’t know how it feels to be me. Everybody’s always telling me how cute and darling the twins are. All my life, people have fallen all over them and just ignored me.” Then, inevitably, she would wail, “Oh, Mother … why did you have to have twins? Why couldn’t you have just
one
like a normal person!”
    Sookie tried to explain. “I’m sorry, honey. It wasn’t anything I planned. It just happened. It was a surprise to me, too. They are the first twins on either side of the family. It was just a fluke.”
    “Well, I hope you’re happy! You’ve ruined my entire life. I will always be some ugly fat lump with bad skin that nobody wants.” And so it went, on and on. She tried to give Dee Dee special attention andbe patient with her, because, unfortunately, what she said was true. Whenever the girls went anywhere, especially when they were younger, people made a huge fuss over the twins and left poor Dee Dee standing there, having to listen to them ooh and aah about how absolutely adorable they were. It broke Sookie’s heart to see her suffer so. And she did know how it felt. Growing up with Lenore, she had always felt like a little brown wren, hopping along behind a huge colorful peacock.

TUESDAY

    J UNE 7, 2005
    T HE NEXT MORNING , S OOKIE WOKE UP EARLY , PREPARED TO TRY TO solve her bird problem. Earle had just walked out the door when the phone in the kitchen started ringing, and she wondered who in the world was calling her so early. It couldn’t be Lenore; she was on her way to water therapy at the senior center. Oh, dear God, please don’t let it be Dee Dee saying she was moving back home. She knew she was having marital problems again and today’s horoscope had warned her to “Expect the unexpected.” Sookie looked at the phone with trepidation and read the number on the readout. It wasn’t Dee Dee. It was that same area code as yesterday, probably the same phone solicitor, so she didn’t pick up. She didn’t have time to talk to anybody now. She had to concentrate on her bird-feeding plan. It was going to be tricky. She’d seen how those blue jays could go through all their food in just a matter of minutes, so she was going to have to move very fast.
    Sookie quickly rinsed off the breakfast dishes and stuck them in the dishwasher, but whoever was calling wouldn’t hang up, and it was distracting. They used to have an answering machine, but Lenore thought it was an open mike for her to speak into on any subject at any time and had left fifteen- and twenty-minute messages on it, sometimes in the middle of the night, so they had to get rid of it.
    As she finished up in the kitchen, she debated whether to put the sunflower seeds for the blue jays in the front yard or the back. If she put the sunflower seeds in the front, someone driving by might see her and want to stop and talk, and she didn’t have a second to spare. So she decided she would start at the back and run to the front. Her success depended on how long it would take the blue jays to finish the sunflower seeds before they discovered the bird seed in front and how fast she could run from one yard to the other.
    But what shoes should she wear? She looked down and realized she shouldn’t try and run in her flip-flops; it was too dangerous. She went to her closet and found nothing