Read Online Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells - Free Book Online

sits on the edge of the bed. I keep on reading out loud, and somewhere in the middle of that article I start to cry. Slow tears, like my body isn’t exactly sure how to do it. I keep reading till I can’t read anymore, and then my wife takes the magazine out of my hands and lays it on the nightstand. She takes that magazine from me and lays it down, and she does the whole thing like she loves me. She makes that one little gesture with tenderness I’ve never seen before. Maybe she’s been doing things like that all along, and I just haven’t seen. Then she climbs up in the bed with us. I can feel all my children’s bodies still warm from their baths, and smell the sachet smell of Vivi’s gown. They’re like little animals, we’re all like animals on that bed in the back bedroom. Nobody says much of anything. I know we’re all crying, but you can’t tell where one person’s crying leaves off and the other person’s begins.
    My Daddy has just died. He’s left me three plantations to run. I thought he’d live forever. I am thirty-three years old and half the time I can’t even breathe. But this one night with all my family in the bed with me is like living on a safe island. It’s the least lonely I’ve been in my whole life.
    I wish I could have more times like this to tell about. I’d give them to my children, gift-wrap them myself to put in front of their eyes.

Skinny-Dipping
    Baylor, 1963
    I t’s summer at Spring Creek, and Sidda, Little Shep, Lulu, and me are getting so good at stilt-walking that I bet Ringling Brothers is gonna call us before school starts up again. Maybe we’ll get hired to perform for a bunch of money and Mama and Daddy will let us travel all over the world. And we’ll only come home to Louisiana for trips to Spring Creek.
    You have to understand that Spring Creek is heaven on earth for a Louisiana summer. It is always ten degrees cooler than any other spot in the state, everybody swears to it. We talk about it all year long. When things get bad crazy in the middle of winter and the windows are all shut, and Mama has her nervous stomach, she will sometimes say: Hey yall, come over here and let’s talk about Spring Creek! And then everything gets a little better.
    Every year on the day after Memorial Day, our maidWilletta helps us pack up the car to head out to our camp at Spring Creek for almost three solid months. The T-Bird is stuffed to the gills with our swimsuits, the first-aid kit, tons of Six-Twelve, stacks of funny-books, and the picnic Willetta has fixed for us. And even though there’s that hump in the back seat where it’s only supposed to fit two, three of us sit back there without pinching or fighting or anything.
    Mama says, Oh, I just wish this car was a convertible! Don’t yall?!
    Yes ma’am! we all say back.
    We’re so happy to be leaving Pecan Grove. We might live on a nice plantation, but sometimes it can wear you out.
    She says, Well, let’s just roll down all the windows and pretend we’re in a convertible!
    And we pull out of the Pecan Grove driveway with the car air-conditioner cranked up full-blast and the windows rolled down—which is a sure sign that Mama is ready for a good summer.
    All the rest of the stuff that can’t fit into the car—the town water in huge glass bottles with cork stoppers, the linens and clean towels, the tractor inner-tubes, folding chairs, ice chests full of food, and the extra rotary fans—Chaney drives all that stuff out in the pickup. He never stays long in Spring Creek because they don’t have colored people out there.
    Mama begs Willetta to come out every year and stay for the summer, but Willetta says, Thank you, but nothank you, Miz Vivi. I rather have my teefs all pulled out than spend the night in that parish.
    Caro with her kids and Necie with hers follow right behind us all the way out there. Mama honks the horn and we wave out the windows, and we’re a wagon train heading to summer—leaving all the daddies in