Sweet Jiminy Read Free Page A

smiled even more widely to cover it up.
    â€œWell, stop by and see us, ya hear?” she said.
    Bo promised he would and raised his hand in goodbye. As the car pulled away, Bo could see Willa and Lyn glance at him in the rearview mirror and burst into chatter, and though an acute muscle spasm coursed through his tensed shoulder, he didn’t lower his arm until they had disappeared down the road.
    Â 
    Jiminy scratched her shoulder absentmindedly as she skimmed another almanac. She’d discovered a pile of them in a dresser drawer in a little room at the back of the farmhouse, and had spent a delightful hour thumbing through the decades-old books, marveling at how sure they purported to be about things nobody could possibly know, such as the weather on a particular day, eleven months away. How accurate had these predictions ended up being? she wondered. Were the people who planned their lives by them idiots, or optimists, or both? And what use were the almanacs once their year had past? They became irrelevant, already proven prophetic or off-base, already gone to seed.
    Jiminy liked that her grandmother kept the old almanacs around. She felt comforted to know that useless things were welcome here.
    Not that Jiminy was comfortable in her uselessness. To the contrary, she longed for a purpose. She always had. Inspired at a young age by Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher, and later—nonfictionally—by Erin Brockovich, Jiminy had held vague ambitions of becoming a private eye or a feisty attorney. But these aspirations had taken a backseat to the day-to-day responsibilities of just getting by. Life with an unreliable mother had robbed her of the sense of security necessary for upward mobility. It had rendered her anxious and shortsighted.
    When Jiminy was in college, her mother had married a wealthy retiree who delighted in her capriciousness and indulged her every whim. The two of them had taken off to travel the world, ostensibly liberating Jiminy to finally focus entirely on her own life. But the years of worry and insecurity had taken their toll, and instilled in her a reflexive skittishness that she seemed unable to shake.
    It had taken all of her nerve just to move to Chicago to pursue law school, and she’d hoped this accomplishment signaled a new proactive boldness. But once there, Jiminy had continued to feel stunted and hesitant, which frustrated her. Her growing certainty that she was withholding some essential part of herself had filled her with quiet desperation. All of this had come into stark relief in the moments after she’d been taken out by the bike courier. As she’d lain there feeling for broken bones, Jiminy had been filled with revulsion for herself and her inability to fulfill the potential she surely possessed. Concerned that this disgust could harden into something crushing, she’d picked herself up, canceled her life as she knew it, and fled to the first place that popped into her mind. Had the bike courier been wearing a “Keep on Trucking” shirt, she might have ended up in San Francisco. As it was, she found herself in rural Mississippi. Exactly what she was to do now remained a mystery.
    Through with the almanacs, Jiminy glanced toward the windowsill and remembered in a flash something she’d discovered about this room nineteen years before and hadn’t thought of since. She ran her hands along the wood paneling beneath the window and, sure enough, felt a square portion give a little beneath her fingers. She pressed harder and experienced the same thrill she had as a six-year-old as it sprang open to reveal a secret compartment.
    Peering into it, Jiminy found a translucent snail shell perched atop a book. She picked up the book and carefully dusted it off. The black leather cover was painfully cracked. It claimed to be The Holy Bible, but the inside pages were homemade and filled with firm, slanted handwriting that Jiminy assumed did not belong to God. The