Read Online The Angry Woman Suite by Lee Fullbright - Free Book Online

was one of my two aunts, and it’s strange that despite the women’s penchant for rules, I wasn’t raised to address my aunts as Aunt Stella or Aunt Lothian—I always called them by their first names. And right then I wanted to tell Stella that these were old shoes too, and that everything we had was old, but I didn't dare risk being called a sassy-mouth because that could be just the very beginning. Although Stella never got really mad at me, I’d seen her at work, screeching and running her number on the other women, and I wanted no part. I hated screeching. It terrified me.
    I rearranged my face and squashed my feelings, squinting up at Stella, noticing how the distance between us and the shadow made by her hat almost hid her harelip and rough skin that made me think of long-standing oatmeal.
    Stella was the oldest of Grandmother’s three daughters, before my mother and then Lothian, so I’d hazard a guess she was thirty-six back then, but already her back had the start of a hump. She had narrow shoulders and big bony hips, which her shapeless cotton dresses couldn't quite hide, and long arms, the longest I'd ever seen, and wide hands—big as hams, Mother said.
    “I'm going, Stella,” I said softly. Stella’s narrow shoulders sagged, which meant she was already feeling awful about talking aggravated to me—I was Stella’s pet.
    “How was the first day?” She walked beside me, inside the fence made of weathered pickets with broken tips. Where the bottoms of the boards had rotted away she’d wired screening between the slats to keep rabbits and gophers out of the vegetables; hence, the holes in the screening around Grayson House’s portico. To someone unfamiliar with Stella, her words might’ve sounded like, “Ow us ta fis ay?”—and Stella was hard to understand, I’ll give you that. She had a speech impediment, the result of a cleft palate, a harelip, a thing that shamed her, which I knew by Stella’s never, ever wanting to go to town. Not that it would’ve mattered had she even wanted to, because Grandmother said going to town was hoo-ha, and Grandmother always had the last word on everyone, Stella especially.
    “Good,” I answered firmly.
    Stella's eyes were a watery blue, and she had long pale lashes that stuck out straight, not curly. She looked at me sharply. “Where's your brother?” This sounded like “Airs er uh-er?”
    “I don't know,” I replied, unable to keep the sullenness from my voice.
    “Ah.” Stella reached across the fence and crooked a finger under my chin. “I see.”
    And I suppose she did.
    “You're an angry boy,” she said matter-of-factly, and just like that my anger was superseded by an inexplicable desire to reinstate my worthiness in Stella's eyes. I say “inexplicable” because Stella had never even insinuated that anger was unattractive. But the point was, regardless of what the women permitted themselves, I knew anger, and not humming or slouching, to be the unattractive habit.
    “Not really angry,” I lied in a small voice. The shadow shifted and I looked up into Stella’s homely face. “They hated me. All the kids at school hated me.” There, I’d just revealed what I’d said I wouldn’t—but I got the desired commiseration. In fact, I got more than I’d bargained for. Baggy dress hitched up to her knees, Stella was over the fence then, all over me, smothering me, covering my face with kisses, murmuring unintelligible things, until, perversely, I wanted to twist free of those groping arms and run away. I couldn’t breathe, and it didn’t matter right then that Stella knew everything about being hated. What mattered was there was no place to run, to breathe, no place to hide, from her.
    I’d no idea what had happened between the women and I’d stopped asking ages ago, when Grandmother had made it abundantly clear that gentlemen did not ask questions that were “improprieties.” But it was impossible to live in Grayson House with all those