Read Online My Old True Love by Sheila Kay Adams - Free Book Online Page B

while I’m plowing, all that stuff? You can manage that, can’t you?”
    I busted out laughing. I could tell by looking at Carolina’s face that she had not thought of all that. Larkin had just lost himself a candidate for wife, and I told him so.
    Mommie held out her arms. Larkin bent down and Carolina fairly scrambled off and hit the ground running. I do not think she wanted to hear no more about marrying. But Mommie would not let it go. “She is way too young to be thinking about that stuff. And her andLarkin is too close a kin to even let her think on it.”
    And I thought,
Oh, no. Here is the pursed mouth and wrinkled-up nose look.
But I had got over that bothering me and could not help ruffling her feathers a little.
    “Why, in six years Carolina will be old as I was when I married her daddy. By Larkin’s age I already had Abigail and we was working on John Wesley. Not even a full year between any of my first three. We was working mighty hard.”
    I knew I had got Mommie’s goat by how red her neck got. I was sorry the minute it left my lips, but even though Larkin shot me a look, I could not wrap my tongue around the words to tell her I was sorry.
    “Arty,” she said, and I could tell she was mortified. “Set there and talk about getting babies. I swear sometimes . . . .”
    She did not say what. But I knew already. She thought I was way too much like Granny and she looked down at the very things in me that she loved in her mama. Mommie was awful bad to preach religion this and religion that. She tried to make everything you did fit in a right place or a wrong place. But that is not the way of it all the time. They is a wide swath of life that is lived right down the middle. I wished you could have seen her face the time she asked me if I had found Jesus and I told her I did not know he had got lost. Oh, but you should
never
say something like that to them folks what have strong beliefs. I thought Mommie’s eyes was going to pop right out on stems. I will never do that again.
    About then I saw Granny take a drink from her crock and Mommie seed her too and I thought,
Oh, Lord,
and I was right, because Mommie set in on her right off.
    “You ought not to drink spirits,” she said.
    And Granny said back, “The gripe in my belly’s worse. Liquor with willer bark tea is about the only thing that helps it.”
    Mommie looked right shocked at that but fussed at her, “That liquor ain’t good for your body or your soul. You ought to drink tea mixed with water. I don’t see how you hold all that liquor anyways.”
    And Granny said the funniest thing I’d ever heard, but I know exactly what she meant now because I am the same way. She said, “Hell, Nancy, I can hold my liquor a lot better than I can hold my water nowdays.”
    I laughed so hard that I had to lay down. Zeke Jr. fell asleep. I must’ve dozed a little, too, since the next thing I recall is hearing Mommie and Granny talking real low as they put food away and gathered up the dishes.
    “Why do you reckon Arty won’t listen to a word I say? I swear sometimes she acts like I ain’t got the sense God give a goose and she just baits me.”
    Of a sudden I was wide awake and listening to every word.
    “Nancy, Nancy, Nancy.” Granny give that sound that meant she’d puffed out her cheeks. “Arty’s just who she is. And it ain’t just how she acts toward you. You got your ways too.”
    That was surely the truth.
    Mommie put on her best I-am-just-killed voice and said, “I have always wanted to be close to her. She is my oldest daughter.”
    And Granny actually laughed at her. “Ye take yourself way too serious, Nancy Ann. Always your way or no way. Well, in case you ain’t noticed Arty is as tough as a pine knot and she has her own way.”
    Mommie sounded so pitiful then that even I felt sorry for her.“Well, I can done see that you’re just going to take her side of it.”
    I was plumb surprised when Granny cut her off. “I have no time for