Blue by You Read Free

face.
    “Would you do me the courtesy of the use of your telephone?”
    But Blue was born and raised in the South and gave Sudie her best PTA smile. “Of course, Miss Sudie.” Together, they headed toward the overseer’s cottage, and Blue slowed her pace to match the older woman’s much slower steps. The deep shadows of the graveyard and trees blended with the diminishing light of the setting orange sun. There were so many things Blue was dying to say and ask, but she’d been raised better. “Would you like a glass of sweet tea while you wait?”
    “Thank you. I’m parched.
    Who’d have thought she’d someday offer sweet tea to Sudie Pennington. Not her. Not anyone with a drop of Toussaint blood in them. The feather in Sudie’s church hat bobbed next to Blue’s jaw and the side of her neck as they walked up the porch. She found her phone next to the rocking chair and beside her Purple Jesus.
    “Would you like to come in while I pour your tea,” she asked, and scooped up her cell.
    “I’ll sit here in this chair if it’s the all same to you.”
    “Certainly. I’ll turn on the zapper so you won’t get eaten alive.” She handed the older woman her phone, walked to the farthest end of the porch, and turned on the fluorescent bulb that lured insects to certain death by electrocution. She glanced at Sudie and her red hat before she opened the screen door and stepped inside. The cottage had been built about ten years after the big house. But unlike Dahlia Hall, the overseer’s home had been modernized. The floors and windows were original, but the plumbing, kitchen, and electricity were fairly new. She pulled out her great-grandmother’s Rosemare wedding crystal and dumped ice into the footed sweet tea glass. She added a sprig of mint for color, then grabbed a set of keys off a hook next to a cordless phone screwed to the wall.
    The screen door slapped the frame as she moved back out onto the porch. Miss Sudie sat in the rocking chair with the cell on one knee. “Did you get ahold of someone?” Blue asked.
    “Yeah, he’s on his way.” Sudie took her tea, studied the glass, then took a drink. “A Toussaint would choose Rosemare. Very prissy. Pennington women prefer Lismore. It’s understated.”
    Blue raised the bunch of keys in her hand and pointed to a control panel at the edge of the driveway to her right. “My mama always said Lismore girls were fast.” The kind who got banged in the back of a Cadillac. She pushed a button on the small keypad with her thumb to open the front gates. She couldn’t see the double gates from where she stood, but a green button on the control panel lit, telling her the heavy iron gates were swinging open. “No disrespect, ma’am.”
    “Of course not, bless your heart.”
    Blue bit her lip to keep from smiling and pulled an old ladder-back chair beside Sudie. She sat and reached for her Purple Jesus. “Did my grandmother win your Crawfish Queen title?” She was born and raised in the South but had never entered a pageant, much to her mother’s and mamaw’s disappointment.
    “No. Martha Jane Morvant won that year. Your grandmother won Catfish Queen.” She rambled on about the difference between the Crawfish and Catfish pageants. She took a long drink, then added, “Martha Jane married a Yankee and moved to Ohio. The last time she came home to visit her momma, she had the most god-awful accent and was wearing white shoes in January. She forgot her raisings, and her family was naturally horrified.”
    “Naturally.” Blue took a drink of her watered-down Purple Jesus. “Bless her heart.”
    The corners of Sudie’s mouth slid up as she took another drink and left a deep red lip print on the family Rosemare. “You married, Miss Blue?”
    Sudie Pennington knew her name. She was more alarmed than surprised. Was it possible that the older woman knew about the summer of 1991? “Divorced.” That hot, sticky day after she’d just turned eighteen? “I married