Read Online Don't Ever Tell by Brandon Massey - Free Book Online Page B

uniform.
    “What you know good, boy?” Dad asked in his gruff voice. A toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth, dipping up and down when he spoke.
    “I was in the area and wanted to stop by to say hello.”
    Dad grunted, used the same soiled towel to blot sweat off his face. He nodded at Joshua’s Ford Explorer, brown eyes shining. “How that truck holdin’ up? ’Bout time for an oil change, ain’t it?”
    He visited his parents every couple of weeks, and every time he saw them, his dad suggested that it was time for an oil change. The mechanic in his father couldn’t resist the compulsion to fix every car he encountered; Joshua was certain that the Oldsmobile his father was currently diagnosing belonged to someone in the neighborhood.
    “I’ll bring it by soon for you to work on,” Joshua said. Dad grunted, and his eyes dimmed. “Mama’s inside,” he said, turning back to the car.
    It was an ordinary exchange with his father. Beyond the subject of automobiles, they never had much to talk about.
He went inside the kitchen. A gigantic pot seethed on the stove, filling the house with the delicious aromas of chicken, broth, dumplings, and vegetables.
Curious, he lifted the lid off the pot—and hissed when the heat stung his fingers. The lid slipped out of his grasp and clanged onto the floor.
“That must be my baby in there,” Mom said, coming around the corner. “Clumsy as ever.”
“Hi, Mom.”
He kissed her on the cheek, which required him to barely bend at all. His mother was a shade less than six feet, her body as thick as a tree trunk. Gray-haired, she wore a shapeless blue house dress, an apron, and threadbare slippers. A pair of bifocals suspended from a lanyard rested on her broad bosom.
Without the glasses, though, her dark eyes were as sharp as ever. They cut into Joshua with the precision of surgical scalpels, and he felt himself weakening under her gaze, swiftly regressing in age from thirty-two to twelve.
“Pick that lid up off the floor, boy,” she said. “And don’t be a dummy—use a mitt this time.”
He grabbed the oven mitt off the counter and used it to pluck the lid off the tile.
“Now wash it off ’fore you put it back on my pot.”
He took the lid to the sink, rinsed it under cold water, and carefully placed it over the pot.
“Come in my kitchen snoopin’ and messin’ up,” Mom said. “Shoot, if you kept in touch with me like a good son should, you’d know I was cookin’ chicken and dumplins. Sit down.”
He sat at the end of the kitchen table. Mom shuffled to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot, and stirred the soup with a big spoon.
“I was in the area and wanted to stop by to say hi,” he said.
“Wanted to stop by to say hi? Like we just acquaintances or somethin’. You ain’t been by here in a month.”
“It hasn’t been that long, Mom. I visited last week.”
“Maybe you did. But I ain’t seen that heifer you married since Thanksgiving. That’s plain disrespectful. You come to see us, but she can’t?”
“She’s been busy with the salon.”
“Wouldn’t trust that heifer as far as I could throw her,” Mom said, hands on her wide hips. “What kinda wife talks her husband into quittin’ a good job so he could go out there and be unemployed and strugglin’?”
His mother had been against him leaving his job to start his business. Although he was earning more money and was happier being his own boss, in his mother’s mind, he was jobless and broke. She blamed Rachel for it, of course.
“She ain’t an honorable woman,” Mom said.
“Why do you say that?”
“She just ain’t. I feels it right here.” Mom touched her breast. “But you ain’t listen to what I think, oh no. Mama done lived sixty-some years but don’t know nothin’!”
He was quiet. Eventually, her tirade would run its course.
She ladled some soup into a bowl and plinked a spoon inside. “Come here and take this.”
He got up, took the bowl, and returned to the