Read Online Given by Susan Musgrave - Free Book Online

is.”
    The coffee Vernal brought me tasted like tea, almost as bad as what you’d get served at the Facility. Marg complained about Ceese Jr. closing the funeral home right in the middle of what was supposed to be their tourist season. She thought it would discourage tourism.
    â€œNo one dies much this time of year, anyway,” said Vernal.
    â€œNot if they do it around here, they don’t,” Marg said. She’d had to pay for her cousin’s body to be shipped to the mainland, which had cost her an arm and a leg. “You know what they say. Some things are just the way they are, and nobody knows what for.”
    Vernal and I were the only patrons, aside from a man who sat in the corner farthest from Marg, next to an artificial Christmas tree, one that appeared to be a permanent fixture. He brought his cup to his lips, blew on it, and then looked over the rim at me. I pretended to be reading the menu on the wall behind him, and wondered if the chickens in the truck that had covered us with feathers were destined to become Today’s Special: Chicken Cordon Blues.
    My attention shifted back to the man in the corner again as he stood up, pushed his chair in, and reached into his pocket to pay for his coffee. He wore a yellow toothbrush on a chain around his neck, had long blue-black hair falling straight from a headband of red cedar bark, and eyes blacker than the inside of a raven. But it was his scent that attracted me most: even from across the room I could taste him — like the air before a storm, long before there is any visible sign of it.
    He had on jeans, a denim jacket, and a pair of boots made out of cobra skin. Another snake had died so he could have a belt to match the boots. At a quick glance I figured the wardrobe was meant to draw your attention away from the fact that he was missing his right hand. He had a hook instead that stuck out below the sleeve of his jacket.
    â€œWe weren’t close,” Marg continued. I watched the man — who swayed as he walked, as if he’d just got off a boat — push open the door and disappear into the rain. “She always had to be first at everything — getting born, getting married, getting knocked up, having kids. Trust her to kick the bucket first.” Marg said she was looking forward to death. She could use the rest.
    Vernal paid for our coffees and told Marg to keep the change. “I can keep anything long’s you don’t ask me to keep a secret,” Marg said. I heard, and saw, Rainy again in my mind’s eye — Rainy in her baby dolls made of a padded quilted material not unlike packing blankets. “A secret ain’t a secret unless keeping it hurts.”
    We went back out into the weather. Vernal nodded to the man with the hook who sat inside the red pickup with the window rolled down, watching us, smiling. Lips you wanted to lick under a moustache — a big moustache, one I associated with fierceness and a high disregard for the law, unlike the one Vernal was experimenting with — that kept you from ever getting quite close enough. Then the smile faded out and he looked at me with an expression of such stony sadness I half expected a solid tear to drop from his eye and bounce across the hood of the hearse like a marble dancing on a drum.
    â€œWho was that?” I asked, as Vernal grabbed my arm and pulled me to him, so I wouldn’t be swallowed by a pothole.
    â€œHooker Moon,” said Vernal, “Gracie’s brother. He’s the one they wrote that song about. ‘Bad Moon Rising’?”
    There was no doubt more to the story, but he didn’t elaborate. We danced our way around the puddles, down the still-deserted street; I could feel the rain trying to take shelter on the inside of my cape. Sandwiched between Ceese Funerals and the medical clinic was a building I hadn’t noticed until now, an unlikely, gaudy little shop painted purple with yellow trim,