Read Online Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells - Free Book Online

not tell. I only know the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.

6
    A fter writing in her journal, Sidda felt sleepy. She let her head drop down over the table and dozed off. Vivi’s scrapbook slid from her lap, and a small key slipped from between the folds of the old pages, and fell on the floor next to her foot.
    When Sidda woke, the first thing she saw was the key. It was a small, tarnished thing, dangling from a chain, about the size of a pecan. What could it unlock? A jewelry box? A small suitcase? A diary? She padded to the sliding glass door and let Hueylene out. It was dawn, but the lake was shrouded in fog so thick that Sidda could not see the opposite shore.
    The key lay in her palm as she stood on the deck looking out into the fog. A few tiny letters appeared to have once been printed on it, but Sidda couldn’t make them out. Stepping back out on the deck to call Hueylene, she pressed the key between her palms and blew into her hands. Then she did a strange, childlike thing: she smelled the key, and licked it. It had a metallic taste that made her shiver slightly, made her feel a surge of Nancy Drew—like excitement.
    She spent the rest of the day walking, eating, and napping. She had no idea she was so tired. Finally, around four, she walked down to the Quinault Mercantile, the small general store that served the area, to use the pay phone.
    She made a little Sign of the Cross, then she dialed her parents’ phone number.
    It was midway into cocktail hour in the state of Louisiana when the portable phone rang at Pecan Grove. Vivi Walker was sitting at the edge of Shep’s vegetable garden in an Adirondack chair, watching her husband pick vegetables for supper.
    “Hello,” Vivi said.
    “Mama, it’s Sidda.”
    Vivi took a sip of her bourbon and branch water. She immediately felt a stab of guilt at having broken her vow of abstinence so soon. She drew a deep breath, and said, “Siddalee Walker? The New York Times oft-quoted Siddalee Walker?”
    Sidda swallowed. “Yes, ma’am, that one. I called to thank you, Mother.”
    “Since when do you call me Mother?” Vivi asked.
    Shep looked over from a row of green peppers. When Vivi mouthed the word “Sidda,” he moved over to the bean poles, farther away from his wife. He’d been the one who had to live with Vivi’s reaction to the Times piece. Vivi had scared him so bad he’d taken her off for a trip to Hilton Head. Shep figured it was better than a doctor-ordered trip, which was what Vivi had seemed headed for.
    Shep Walker didn’t understand his wife, never had. To him, she was another country that he needed a passport to visit. He had given up on ever knowing what made her tick. She was harder to live with than a cotton crop, and Lord knows, cotton needed tending. But she could still surprise him, after forty-two years, and she knew how to make him laugh, something not many people did. When she rode in the back fields with him, sitting shotgun in his pickup, she still really listened when he rambled on about his rice or cotton or crayfish or soybeans. And once in a while, when she turned to him the way she did, tilting her head to ask a question,Shep felt like a young man again. There had been a mighty sexual attraction between them when they were young. An attraction that had waned—not so much with years, but from the exhaustion of trying to survive each other.
    “I never trusted women who called their mamas Mother,” Vivi said into the phone.
    “Sorry. I called to tell you that I’m—well, Mama, I’m overwhelmed by your sending me the scrapbook. It’s incredibly generous.”
    “It’s the least I could do for the legitimate theater,” Vivi said. “But remember that Clare Boothe Luce was much, much older than the Ya-Yas. And the Ya-Yas love each other, unlike