Read Online Home Free by Sonnjea Blackwell - Free Book Online Page B

into a drunken brawl with a much older guy
over a somewhat older girl. Somehow, a gun appeared, and the man
got dead. It was certainly bad, but it seemed to me more the result
of alcohol and a genetically bad temper than pure, unadulterated
evil. Would the Junior who killed a man in a drunken rage kill a
man in cold blood and set his own brother up to take the blame? It
seemed far-fetched, but people had done a lot worse, I
supposed.
    There were no more articles on Junior
Salazar, and I couldn’t think of anything else to search, so I
returned to the Garden Tour poster. It took awhile, but eventually
I came up with a design that was not only more appropriate than my
earlier attempt, but actually pretty darn good. Lettering wound
around tree trunks like ivy, inviting one and all to the annual
event. It beat the heck out of cemeteries, so I emailed it off and
shut down the computer. I went to the kitchen to make a pitcher of
iced tea and a plate of cheese and crackers. As usual, I was
starving, and Pauline was due any minute.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    “I thought you said you were going out with
Murphy tonight. You need to be prepared.”
    “I am prepared. I said we had a date. I
didn’t say I was going to bring him home and fuck him till next
Thursday.”
    Pauline and I were drinking iced tea in my
living room, our feet up on the coffee table. I finished the cheese
and crackers five minutes before she arrived. She’d stopped by
after work, as promised, to find out why I was looking into calls
made to Danny’s phone numbers. I’d given her the nickel tour of my
new house, and she made a big production of looking for condoms in
my night table. There was one. Only one.
    “How long has it been?”
    “Well, let’s see...” I thought back.
    “Forget it. If you can’t remember, it’s been
too long.” That much I knew.
    She opened her purse and dug around, pulling
out a mascara and a stun gun before finding what she was looking
for.
    “Here, take these.” She handed me a pack of
five condoms, which I threw on the coffee table.
    “Why do you have a stun gun?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “You never know. There’s
weirdos out there.”
    Uh-hunh.
     
    School was out and Danny worked at the gravel
yard, shoveling gravel all day in the sweltering heat until it was
time for baseball practice or a game. By contrast, I lived the life
of leisure. I worked at the mall, doling out ice cream cones and
banana splits at Baskin Robbins three afternoons a week. But my
primary occupation was working on my tan. I would lie out by the
pool for hours, reading fashion magazines and romance novels, or
sometimes Pauline and I would ride our bikes out to the lake to sun
ourselves and do our part to drive the local boys crazy. The good
life.
    Danny would appear out of nowhere when nobody
was home, or else he’d call and invite me over for an iced tea. To
this day, I have a hard time ordering an iced tea in a restaurant,
for fear of what the waiter will do. Danny was still dating Sherry,
and I was still dating Derek, and that was just fine with me. I
felt like I had the best of all possible worlds - a safe,
non-threatening boyfriend who didn’t give my father heart
palpitations, and mind-blowing sex with a guy no one would believe
had ever even noticed me. The only negative was that I couldn’t
talk to anybody about it. Danny had never asked me to keep our
relationship, if that’s what it was, a secret. I was the one who
didn’t want anyone to know. And as much as I wanted to tell Pauline
every sordid detail, somehow I just couldn’t. So I explained my
periodic good moods as a result of lots of fresh air, and let it go
at that.
    Pauline and I had gone to watch the baseball
game one night. My mother was proud of how supportive I’d become of
my brother, going to watch most of his games when I’d never cared
about them in the least before. Truthfully, I had no idea what
position Kevin played. The game had ended, and Pauline and I