Two Shades of Morning Read Free Page A

over what she knew to be a squandering of unaccounted-for money. But she didn’t say that. What she said was, “Little Robert Dale must of struck oil down yonder at Bony Branch.”
    Sibyl laughed, tipping her head back. “Y’all make a place and set down.”
    “On this?” said Aunt Birdie, patting the cushion of the curved white sofa.
    “That’s what it’s for.” Sibyl flashed her fat teeth.
    I thought of her teeth as expensive, like the leggy ballerina figurine poised next to Aunt Birdie’s red mayhaw jelly on the glass coffee table.
    Aunt Birdie plopped on the sofa, and I perched next to her blunt knees. I was no longer the prettiest girl in Little Town.
    Sibyl lit on a velvet chair like a harlequin butterfly and crossed her legs with a gold shoe peeping from the hem of her silky black jumpsuit. Her foot twitched steadily while she talked. At times her voice grew coarse, but she checked it and continued in her lilting drawl, which I supposed represented the cream of middle Florida: all “R” sounds dropped from words, remaining consonants purled and vowels brayed.
    That afternoon, following tea sipped from bird-bone thin demitasse cups, Sibyl took us on a tour of the house. Aunt Birdie lagged on the stairs, nursing her bunions, and stared down at the polished living room, while Sibyl and I waited on the top landing.
    “I been after Robert Dale to have y’all over,” she said. “He told me about you all being so close.”
    “We grew up together,” I said. “He and P.W. are old buddies from way back. Used to work together.”
    She smiled and said, “Oh yeah!” as though she had suddenly made some important and shocking connection. I didn’t know whether to laugh or leave. “Robert Dale told me all about you,” she added.
    As Aunt Birdie hobbled alongside, Sibyl took her natural lead, chortling. Aunt Birdie glanced at me, giving only that, a glance, as if to say the cause of my puzzlement didn’t call for a reprimanding stare. A spendthrift hypocrite. Don’t credit her with more. And off she trudged in Sibyl’s footprints, fagged and bored with the final phase of the tour.
    I tagged behind while Sibyl exhibited more rooms of white. They were furnished like the living room: lead crystal and harsh contemporary paintings, much like a furniture showroom.
    She perceived my dwindling interest right away; I could see it as our eyes mirrored impressions. I smiled too late to cover it. “Y’all live in that little trailer on the other side of me, right?” she said.
    “The blue one.” I caught my mistake.
    “Isn’t it the only one on this road?”
    “I guess so.”
    “I don’t see how you stand it.” She dusted the top of a dark cherry bureau with her palm.
    “They ain’t got no choice till P.W. can get on his feet,” said Aunt Birdie, becoming more apparently disgruntled the longer we stayed.
    Sibyl smiled condescendingly at Aunt Birdie and a chill stole over me. It was as if she knew something you didn’t or couldn’t know, had some power that rendered you powerless, as if there was only so much and she possessed it all. Never mind the cutdowns; you can’t match them. And I never did.
    I didn’t know until it was too late, and knowing made no difference anyway, but Sibyl’s power was not in her ingenuity, nor in her unscrupulousness, but in her ingrained ability to confuse.

    * * * * *

Chapter 2
    A slow drizzle set in the next evening and struck up sounds of quarreling among the frogs at Bony Branch. A continuous treble rising like vapors over the swampy woods behind our mobile home.
    P.W. and I had been summonsed to dinner at Sibyl’s. Dinner was midday for us, and we stood gaping out the kitchen door after Mae had delivered her mistress’s message—”Miss Sibyl say be there at seven tonight, and she don’t mean eight neither.” Dodging mud holes in my yard, she tramped back toward the tall white house softened by smoky drapes of Spanish moss.
    P.W. ducked inside and headed for his