Waking Up in Dixie Read Free Page A

carefully closed the door, even though the insides of the windows were coated with frost. At least the door blocked the raw December wind.
    She carefully selected a battered bucket from the store’s leavings and poured it half full with water from the trash cans they’d used to collect rainwater from the downspouts.
    But she made too much noise. After a spate of shuffling footsteps on the broken linoleum, the sour smell of BO and cheap wine preceded her father’s appearance at the opening to the front of the store. He scowled, his arms akimbo under the coats and sweaters and multiple pairs of jogging pants piled onto his gaunt frame. “What the hell is that?”
    “It’s Christmas,” she said as cheerfully as she could manage. “So I got us a tree.”
    He collapsed into one of the scavenged chairs around the huge cable spool they used for a table. “Bullshit. Christmas is a hunnerd percent bullshit,” he slurred, waving a hand in dismissal. “Totally commercial. All them Jews soaking all them dumb-ass Christians for money, that’s all it is.” He leaned back to holler, “Jacob! Git in here.”
    Elizabeth tensed. If only she’d been quieter, she’d have had a chance to put on the string of popcorn and colorful paper chain her teacher had let her take home for the holidays. Then maybe her daddy might have smiled instead of gotten mad. She was his pet, after all.
    “I’ve got some decorations for it, Daddy,” she said. “It’ll be real pretty. Just you wait and see.”
    “Jacob!” her father blared. “I said git in here! If I have to call you again, it’s a beatin’!”
    Daddy was always whaling away at her big brothers, even Liam, who was a strapping man at nineteen. Especially when all of them had been drinking, which was most of the time. Why Daddy spared her, she’d never been able to figure out. And though she was grateful, Bessie Mae felt guilty every time she escaped his wrath.
    She let out a sigh of relief when Jacob—at sixteen, already four inches taller than Daddy—sidled into the room, his expression dark and sullen. “Whut now?”
    Daddy pointed to the little tree. “Put that into the stove in my room and light it. Then git yer coat and cut some more.” He glared, pulling his clothes tighter around him. “This place is colder than a witch’s tit.”
    Jacob saw Bessie Mae’s disappointment about the tree. “I cain’t, Diddy,” he dared to say, deliberately keeping out of their father’s reach. “Gotta git to the pool hall. I’m already late. Dewey Sosebee bet me a truckload of oak against forty dollar that he kin beat me.” He pulled a frayed jacket from the Salvation Army over his flannel shirt. “I’ll have that wood here in less than an hour.”
    Their father’s brows lowered dangerously. “You better, or there’ll be hell to pay. And yer mama better git herself home from work soon and fix me some supper.” He lurched out of his chair and started rummaging through the mess, looking for a bottle. “I’m hungry.”
    And thirsty.
    Bessie Mae and her brother took advantage of the distraction to slip out the back door and run. When they got to the end of the street, her brother pulled a beer from his coat pocket and popped the top, then grinned. “You better make yerself scarce tonight, Annie.” He called her “Annie” because she tried to talk like her teachers and believed that one day she would be rich, just like Little Orphan Annie in the musical. “There ain’t no pool game,” he confessed, “and no firewood. So we both better lay low.”
    Bessie Mae looked back at the dark store. “But what about Mama? And Liam?”
    “They can take care of themselves,” Jacob told her. “Now, go on. Git yerself to the library. You can hide when they’re closin’ up, then sleep there all night.”
    It wouldn’t be the first time, and the library was Bessie Mae’sfavorite place, thanks to all the happy endings on its shelves. “Okay.”
    She felt guilty about Mama and