Ugly Ways Read Free Page A

preferred to think of her child falling victim to a heart attack, the disease of the hardworking, rather than letting herself become the plaything of the mind's whim. A nervous breakdown. Mudear couldn't even bring herself to say the words. A nervous breakdown.
    It was so weak sounding. A breakdown. "What she got to break down about?" Mudear had asked the walls of her sumptuous bedroom over and over. And then she had badgered her husband when he came home from work in the chalk mines with the same question. "What she got to break down about?"
    Even when Betty, considered the strongest of the girls, went through that period when she couldn't stop itching and scratching herself even after she went to the dermatologist and got a soothing lotion that didn't work, she showed up for work every day, helped put on the annual hair and beauty show like always, and made sure dinner was cooked for Mudear and Poppa.
    She was only doing what was expected of her. What Mudear expected of her. She could still hear Mudear say, "Save that crazy shit for your own time, now get up off that floor and go on to that cosmetology seminar, like you got some sense."
    Taking care of responsibilities, duties, business was always the first priority. If the three girls expected to live out their lives in Mudear's good graces, then they had to produce.
    "There's nothing worse than a trifling, slouchy woman. It's okay for a man, what more can you expect? That don't have nothing to do with my girls. Being a trifling man. You know what I expect and you know why I expect it.
    "Women who don't care nothing about themselves," Mudear would mutter to herself as she sat by the kitchen window looking out over her yard and overseeing dinner preparation in a flowered housecoat with a flounce at the neckline. "Don't even take baths. Be smelling like the city docks." And her daughters would immediately stop their cleaning or cooking or chopping or washing or frying and begin scrutinizing each other for signs of triflingness, smelling the air around each other. They never felt they could assume that their mother was referring to some event or person far removed from them. They couldn't take that chance.
    It was what Betty finally said to Annie Ruth at the airport to get her to walk back to where the car was parked under her own steam.
    "Don't be so trifling, Annie Ruth," Betty whispered to her baby sister as Emily showed the skycap the way to the car. "Buck up."
    The girls never even considered saying what they all had thought at one time or another when Mudear went into one of her tirades about triflingness: that Mudear was probably the most trifling woman they had ever seen. A woman who spent most of her days lying in her throne of a bed or in a reclining chair or lounging on a chaise longue dressed in pretty nightclothes or a pastel housecoat. Doing nothing with her time but looking at television, directing the running of her household, making sure her girls did all the work to her specifications. Then, if she felt like it, some gardening at night.
    She did nothing else. Nothing, that is, but wash out her own drawers each night after everyone else had gone to bed.

CHAPTER 3
    When the three Lovejoy sisters walked into the foyer of their parents' split-level house, they were not even aware of it, but they dropped the bags they were carrying and reached for each other, their fingertips barely brushing. All three of them felt the absence within the house, a house that even still smelled faintly like Mudear, like red spicy cinnamon balls. The girls all caught the scent of the fiery candy at the same time and almost looked around for Mudear to appear.

    They had been nearly silent on the car trip from the airport. Annie Ruth, back in the bosom of her sisters, had just about regained her composure as she lay across the backseat of the car listening to Sade sing of faith, trust, and love. Pulling herself together was what each of the Lovejoy girls did best. But there in the