Southern Poison Read Free Page A

virginity and wasted no time in teaching her precisely how to please him. Since her first gynecological exam at age thirteen, she’d known of her sterility—one category in which the DNA crapshoot had been unreasonably cruel to her—but now she felt feminine for the first time in her life. Her defective eggs didn’t matter anymore, and in hindsight, they hadn’t mattered all along. Chuck didn’t want children. The world was already overpopulated, he’d said. It was fate that put the two of them in the same hotel for a weekend conference. Fate that seated them side by side at a keynote speaker luncheon. Fate that merged discussions of two entirely separate projects, hers and his, both of which flopped during field trials. One pharmaceutical dud and one commercial-glue fiasco that, merged together, had changed futility and frustration into promise and progress. Peggy wasn’t sure whether she believed in God or not, but a higher power of some distinction had to be at work. Everything happened for a reason, she learned, and her life was meant to be exactly the way it was turning out.
    Chuck had been so impressed with Peggy that he built a satellite laboratory in Wilmington and hired her to head up the first stage of Project Antisis. She’d been willing to move to Roanoke, Virginia, where ECH Chemical Engineering&Consulting resided. For privacy reasons, though, Chuck chose to run Project Antisisfrom a satellite location and found the perfect spot right in Wilmington. Peggy Lee manufactured the synthetic plant-based chemical, which she added to a nontoxic adhesive, and shipped the raw material to a production and packaging facility in Virginia.
    The pieces were rapidly and efficiently falling into place. Chuck traveled to Wilmington almost weekly, and she anticipated his visits like a military wife waiting for her soldier to come home. Even though they couldn’t truly be together until phase one of Project Antisis was fully implemented, she was happy. Blissfully happy, she realized, toweling dry, deciding what she would wear to the lab that day. As she pulled a pair of jeans and cotton top out of a drawer, Peggy Lee’s mind wandered to other clothing. A wedding dress, for starters. He was simply waiting for the right time to propose. She just knew it.

THREE
    “When are they
gonna haul away that damn hunk of junk, for crying out loud?” Spud complained, asking nobody in particular. People think he looks like a much older, shrunken version of Wolfgang Puck. Except my father’s demeanor is much different from the famous chef’s, and right now, agitation was the flavor of the moment. “That stupid car is still causing me headaches.”
    Spud and Bobby, one of my father’s poker buddies, had joined Ox and me for a midday snack at the Block. It was well past lunchtime and too early for the happy-hour crowd, and a smattering of low-maintenance customers sat around eating peanuts and drinking beers. Ruby tended to everyone and still had plenty of time to catch up on local gossip with the regulars.
    “The insurance adjuster was a young kid, and once he took a look at your Chrysler, he wasn’t sure how to write up the report. Said he had to send a senior adjuster out,” I explained to my father for the third or fourth time. “Should be sometime this week.”
    After deteriorating eyesight claimed Spud’s driver’s license, he’dembarked on a mission to get rid of his Chrysler LHS. Unfortunately, his valuation of the vehicle was much higher than anyone else’s and he couldn’t sell it. Mad at the state of North Carolina and obsessed with getting rid of the car, he’d schemed ways to lose it so he could collect the insurance money, right up until a local cop offered to buy it. When Spud finally snagged a buyer with cash in hand—a buyer willing to pay the full asking price—my father had an epiphany: he would keep the car so his friends could tote him around in it. Minutes later, somebody drove a garbage truck into