Unexpected Dismounts Read Online Free PDF Page A

Allison has a heart as—”
    “She has a bleeding heart, far as I can tell.” Ms. Willa waved the bejeweled hand at India without taking her eyes from me. The old lady’s talons were polished to a crimson sheen.
    “These women,” Ms. Willa said, “don’t they have food stamps and Medicaid and everything else my tax dollars are paying for?”
    “Yes, ma’am, they do,” I said. “We use every service available to them.”
    “Then again I ask: What do you need my money for?”
    Bonner purged his throat yet again. I was beginning to suspect he had a hairball. “Ms. Livengood, what we’re most in need of is an additional residence so we can house more women and provide them with the kind of personal assistance—”
    “You want me to buy them a house.”
    I thumped the ottoman. “There you go. That would be fabulous.”
    The old lady leaned forward in her chair, leaving an indentation in the cushions just big enough for a five-year-old. “Can you prove to me that these ho-ahs aren’t going to turn the building named after me into a drug den?”
    It took me a few seconds to realize “ho-ahs” was Southern for “whores.” India leaped into the stunned silence.
    “That’s the beauty of it, Ms. Willa. Once they come into the Sacrament House ministry, they can leave their old lives behind. They don’t need drugs anymore.”
    “Nobody ‘needs’ drugs in the first place,” Ms. Willa said. “They choose to take them, and the minute you give them everything else they want, they’ll just go out and do it again. They’ll be coming around here robbing our homes. I’ve taken to keeping a gun in the house because I know how these people are.”
    “Really,” I said. “You have some drug-addicted friends, then?”
    Ms. Willa drew herself up to her full sitting height, all of about four foot ten. “I most certainly do not!”
    “Then how do you know ‘how they are’?”
    “I think what Ms. Willa is trying to say—”
    Ms. Willa chopped India off with the diamonds yet again. “Don’t tell me what I’m trying to say.”
    “Then you tell me, lady,” I said. “Because I’m not getting how you can sit there and tell me you know all about something you haven’t been within a hundred feet of.”
    “I read.”
    “Can I read a book about you and know Willa Livengood?”
    “No one has written a book about me.”
    India tittered an octave out of her range. “I wish they would, Ms. Willa. That would be a best seller, now, wouldn’t it?”
    Ms. Willa ignored her this time and craned her neck at me like a ticked-off turkey. “All I know is that you might be able to rehabilitate a person who has turned herself over to drugs, but you cannot keep her rehabilitated. People don’t change.”
    She sat back and pursed her lips like she was pulling a drawstring. At first all I could do was blink at her—and listen to the nervous shuffling around the room, which was enough to rattle the Lladró in its cabinet. I’d have cheerfully yanked open the glass door and let every china-faced angel jitter itself out. Until I heard it again: Allison, wash their feet.
    Yeah. Somebody get a bucket so I can soap up this lady’s gnarly old dogs. I wasn’t appreciating God’s sense of humor at that point.
    “Maybe we should regroup here,” Bonner said.
    “Would some figures help?” Chief said.
    “I think we all just need to take a little break and sweeten our palates,” India said.
    Or let’s all take off our shoes. Really? ‘Wash their feet’? That’s all you have for me in this situation?
    “Well?” Ms. Willa was watching me, a victorious glint in her eyes.
    “Well,” I said. “If people don’t change, then I guess we’re done, because evidently I have a bleeding heart. And yours is completely anemic.”
    Ms. Willa gasped. Or maybe that was India. Actually it could’ve been anybody in the room, except Hank, who didn’t appear to be breathing at all.
    I wasn’t sure how we got out of there. The next