Ugly Ways Read Free Page B

hall, its bare cream-colored walls reminding them that Mudear hated pictures of any kind on the wall, the living room furniture lived-in and free of what she called "Sherwood Forest plastic," it hit them all that their mother, who had ruled this modern brick split-level ranch house for nearly thirty years, had ruled it in the same way she had commanded their old two-story wooden house in East Mulberry before, was truly dead. They fell into each other's arms weeping and moaning like the surviving village elders at the funeral of a child.
    They felt again as they had for a good time after Mudear changed when they were young children. Like survivors of a war. Like Vietnamese boat people, soldiers, young boys turned men on the battlefield, bloodied, gimp-legged, hobbling on to the promise of peacetime. Stepping over the dead bodies, the ones who didn't make it, who didn't survive.
    For a long while they didn't even notice that their father was standing there next to them by the door, his long strong arms dangling uselessly at his side, waiting to greet Annie Ruth, his youngest. They were too taken with themselves to notice him. Too taken with their own personal sorrow. They didn't mean to exclude him. They never did. They were just too busy with themselves to think of him.
    These girls always did belong to Mudear, he thought. He silently waited his turn.
    They were hardly girls. Betty had just turned forty-two, Emily was thirty-eight, and Annie Ruth, the baby, was still thirty-five, although she told people she was thirty-two. A woman with two days' makeup on she had met one night taking a whore's bath in the sink of an L.A. nightclub ladies' room had instructed Annie Ruth with a wink, "You look young, hon. Play younger."
    The sisters, still dressed in their outerwear, smelling of designer perfume and cigarette smoke, wept in the hallway until their sobs faded into moans and then trailed off into muffled hiccups. It wasn't that they mourned for Mudear as much as they feared the absence of her, the lacuna they knew her absence would leave in their lives.
    Their father stood to the side watching the whole scene of his daughters' weeping like an atheist watching a Passion play. At one time he, too, had worshiped at the altar of Mudear, weeping, bowing, pleasing. First, out of awe. Then, out of competition. Then, out of fear, he worshiped.
    "Betty Jean?" he finally said softly to his eldest daughter. She turned wiping the tears dripping from her high cheekbones.
    Betty heaved a sigh and said, "We okay, Poppa. It was just coming in the house and knowing she's not here. That's all. We okay. You want something to eat?" and she began taking off her shawl as she headed for the kitchen.
    While Emily struggled to push the luggage out of the entranceway, Annie Ruth turned to her father.
    "Hi, Poppa," she said and walked over to get her hello hug. He hugged the way many men did: stiffly, like a stick figure inside his long-sleeved plaid shirt and worn brown work pants with his arms and body at angles to her. He didn't embrace her. Rather, he let her lean against him, let her brush her cheek against his as he patted her on the back sharply two times.
    Annie Ruth steeled herself for the brush of his beard stubble against her cheek, but she was not at all prepared for the doughy feel of his face. Her father's face felt to Annie Ruth like her grandfather's had the few times they had visited him in the country when she was a child. Poppa can't be that old, she thought.
    Their father was just sixty-eight, a year away from retirement at the kaolin mines outside of town where he had worked since he was nineteen. He still had the slowly weakening strong slim body of a man who had spent his youth and most of his middle years digging and hauling chunks and boulders of the soft white stone. He had always taken pride in the way he looked—his tall strong body, his large head, his big feet, his slender hands—being careful not to take on a paunch