Whistling Past the Graveyard Read Free

were gonna live in a big house in Nashville with horses and whatnot, and Mamie would have to stay stuck here in Cayuga Springs all by her hateful self.
Just before I went out the back screen door, I turned around and looked at Mamie. I was real proud when I kept my voice respectful. “My name is Starla. Not Jane.”
Then I run out the back screen before she could say anything else. I heard it slam behind me, but kept running around the corner of the house.
I was real surprised not to hear Mamie hollerin’ for me to come back.
    I decided to spend some time in my fort, just to stay out of Mamie’s sight so I wouldn’t fall into getting in trouble. Course my fort wasn’t really a fort, but a giant, waxy-leafed magnolia in our side yard. Mamie said it was almost a hundred years old. Back before I knew people weren’t as old as I thought they were, I asked if she remembered when it sprouted. She’d scrunched up her face like she was gonna be mad before she laughed and told me she was only forty-two years old, too young to even be a grandmother of a six-year-old.
    Anyway, the tree. The branches go clean down to the ground and there’s just enough space for me to get inside. Nobody can see me. I keep Daddy’s old Howdy Doody lunch box in there with stuff I don’t want Mamie to stick her nosy nose into—mostly stuff that belonged to my momma and whatnot. I’d even found two pictures of her in a drawer in Daddy’s room. Mamie kept everything in there just the same as it had been when Daddy’d been growing up. I wasn’t even supposed to go inside, even though Daddy had told Mamie I could have his room ’cause it was bigger and he wasn’t hardly ever here. Mamie had told Daddy she’d think about it, but that was a lie. When I asked her when I’d be able to change rooms, she’d looked at me with those hateful eyes she gets and said, “Never.” Now I sneak in there and sleep at night sometimes, even though I never even wanted to before. What with Mamie’s bedroom being downstairs, she never even knew. I was always careful not to leave clues.
    I opened the lunch box and pulled out the birthday cards from Lulu—one for every year except for when I turned six; that one must have got lost in the mail.
    I laid on my back and read them, tracing my finger over the big, loopy L in Love you and the little x ’s and o ’s that were kisses and hugs sent through the mail. I spent some time thinking about Momma— Lulu recording her songs up in Nashville, getting famous. The memory of her was worn and fuzzy on the edges, since I hadn’t seen her since I was three. But I know I have the exact same color of red hair, so that’s the brightest spot in the picture I kept in my head.
    Back when Momma and Daddy and me all lived together, I remember liking to twist her hair around my finger while she held me on her hip. I loved the way it felt soft and slippery, like the satin edge of my blanket. Momma didn’t like it though, ’cause she’d spent a long time getting it to look just right and I messed it up. I remember her and Daddy getting in a fight once when she smacked my hand away. It was all my fault, and I’d felt bad. When we all got to live together again, I’d be careful not to cause any fights. I put away the birthday cards and closed the lunch box. Then I just laid there for a spell, watching light dance with shadows and thinking about what I was gonna name my horse. By 10:32—I knew the time exactly ’cause Daddy had given me a really neat Timex with a black leather band for Christmas—it was already about a thousand degrees out. The brick street out front looked like it was wiggling from the heat. Dogs had already crawled under porches and into garages to get out of the hot sun. They would come out after sunset with cobwebs on their noses and dirt clinging to their coats like powdered sugar.
    Wish I had a dog.
One like Lassie.
She’d follow me everywhere. I was thinking on how she coulda gone
    to get help when