Read Online Cold Tea on a Hot Day by Curtiss Ann Matlock - Free Book Online

definitely disapproved.
    “Might be one of us next,” Reggie said.
    Marilee and Charlotte cast each other curious glances, and Reggie said she wondered if Ms. Porter might not be feeling her skin crawling at the removal of her daddy from the wall.
    “I’ve been halfway waitin’ for the wall to cave in, E.G. having his say from the grave,” she said.
    “The walls are apparently holding,” Charlotte said, “and he’s hanging them with all sorts of pictures. He has one of him with President Nixon. I don’t know why he’d want to advertise it,” she added.
    “He has one of him with Reba,” Reggie put in with some excitement. “He did a feature piece on her for Parade Magazine. ”
    Reggie had every one of Reba McEntire’s albums. She suddenly grabbed up a pen to hold in front of her mouth like a microphone and began singing one of Reba’s songs. This was something she often did, pretending either to be a singer or a television commentator. Reggie was every bit pretty enough to be either; however, she could take clowning and showing off to the point of annoyance, as far as Marilee was concerned. Right then was one of those points, and Marilee felt her temper grow short as Reggie kept jutting her face in front of Marilee’s and singing about poor old Fancy.
    “Reggie, would you keep an eye on Corrine and Willie Lee for me?” she said, thus diverting the woman to more quiet childishness, while Marilee went to their publisher’s solid oak door and knocked.
    The sound of hammering drowned out her knock, and she had to try again, and when still no answer came, she poked her head in the door. “Mr. Holloway?” She was unable to address him as Tate, being at the office.
    He turned from where he was hanging a picture. “Marilee! Come in…come in. Just the person I’ve been waitin’ for. You can come over here and help me get this picture in the right place.”
    It was a picture of him with Billy Graham, black-and-white, as all the photographs appeared to be. He placed it against the wall and waited for her instructions, which she gave in the form of, “Higher…a little to the left…a little lower. Right there.”
    Having, apparently, a high opinion of her ability to place a picture, he marked the spot and went to hammering in a nail.
    In a flowing glance, Marilee, wondering how an accomplished journalist of Tate Holloway’s wide experience would manage in tiny Valentine, took in the room. The sedate, even antiquated office that had belonged to Ms. Porter was gone. Or perhaps a more accurate description was that it was being moved out, as pictures and books and boxes full of articles, a number of them antiques, were in a cluster by the door. Next to that, in a large heap, lay the heavy evergreen drapes, which had been ripped from the long windows, leaving only the wooden blinds through which bright light shone on the varied electronic additions: a small television, a radio scanner, a top speed computer and printer, a laptop computer, and one apparatus that Marilee, definitely behind the electronic times, could not identify.
    The major change, however, was to the big walnut desk, which had been moved from where it had sat for eons in front of the windows, facing the wall with E. G. Porter’s portrait. Marilee had always had the impression that Ms. Porter would sit at the desk and look at her father on the wall and worship him. Or maybe throw mental darts at him.
    Now the desk sat in front of that wall, looking awayfrom it, and behind, where E.G.’s august portrait had hung, was an enormous black-and-white photograph of Marilyn Monroe in the famous shot with her dress blowing up.
    After eyeing that for a startled moment, Marilee’s gaze moved on to the clusters of photographs already hung—the ones of Tate Holloway with Reba and President Nixon, and ones of him receiving awards, and with soldiers, and a curious one of a boy plowing with a mule. She stepped closer for a better look at that one. Next to the