Read Online Solemn by Kalisha Buckhanon - Free Book Online Page B

(who parked a van in Singer’s in lieu of rent) to spread this: “Gilroy came to the courthouse in handcuffs but he walked out in a silk tie.” So least everybody could say they never saw any sad daddy put a good tie on that quick.
    All the talk fluttered around her. Nothing worse than losing a child but being blamed for the loss. Other women were the worst. Throughout Bledsoe, the story of “that woman” was spread. Underneath their own maternal crowns, they doubted her.
    â€œYou never put no man before your child.”
    â€œShe shouldn’a moved all the way out there where cotton used to grow anyway.”
    â€œI wonder if she even loved the poor thang … she never showed it off.”
    There were none among them to remove the apprehension shown to any black person who attracted controversy, whites, or public interest. And Pearletta had attracted it all. The smartest thing to do, in their eyes, was to treat Pearletta with the cordial manners they all grew up on. It went quicker that way. Their antidote to mourning, hunger, heartache, dispossession, repossession, a white: it was the same. Treat it like it isn’t there.

 
    SIX
    Just in time for the holidays, the Route 17 gas station achieved a liquor license. Rumor had it there was to be a renaissance of Tudors on the nearby scrapyard’s and oil field’s abandoned acres, for corporate executives of Jackson to upgrade upon and Southern natives to flock into. The building was to take a few years. The journeymen would like to drink on the job before drinks after work. Pearletta took advantage and started with six-packs of beer. She figured the walk to the gas station to get it and back home would help manage the pouting belly it soon produced. The little girls on pink and yellow bikes with tassels on the handlebars did not bother her. Nor did little boys racetracking twigs and rocks and cat’s-eye marbles. Nor did the growing boys who hinted she could buy them beer. It was grown men’s pickup trucks careened in and out of the entrance with ample slowdown for her, and women with brown bundles balanced in their arms, and packs of teenagers with phony, immature whispers.
    â€œHello, Mrs. Hassle … How you doin’ out here in this heat?”
    None of them ever knew her first name. Only his last one.
    â€œI’m fine … how you?”
    â€œGood. Have a nice day, Mrs. Hassle.”
    At home, the Sydney Olympics occupied her—least the part including a muscular Marion Jones, a cornrowed black gal to root for. When the games ended, Pearletta fell in love with Bruce Lee, on DVDs the gas station rented now. She loved to see the young man from Hong Kong drop-kick his assailants and sneak out of hidden corners by early dawn, grunting and shouting and intimidating. Sometimes, with the blinds drawn, she followed him and replicated his moves, like he was an aerobics instructor at a YWCA her mother was devoted to. At the ends of her unpolished toenails were the faces of Gilroy, cops who looked past her when she talked, best friends who forgot her, old flames who burnt out, neighbors who did not hear the spitting and the choking and the gurgling. Sometimes, there was the little family up at top of the heap with a trailer much bigger than hers, daddy and mama and son and pretty girl inside. She drop-kicked all of them and chopped their heads off with her bare hands.
    One day, near Thanksgiving, the man called Redvine pulled in with his family. Pearletta was about to cross into the bend of their shared acres long after he would have cut a soft left to head home. His beige Malibu appeared against the dusk sky and gravel road undulated to firmament. The car seemed to be waiting for her, only no one called out to tell her. This was the difference now. People stopped, stared, hesitated, and seemed to have something important to say. But it all wound around the same topic, so there was nothing. She was on