Read Online The Wisdom of Hair by Kim Boykin - Free Book Online

house since Emma died. Look, I know this all seems wildly romantic to you, but if I lose my apartment, I’ll have to move back home.”
    “Well, what if he’s hurt or dying?”
    I didn’t have an answer for that.
    “What if I go? Then you won’t get in trouble.”
    I didn’t answer her right off. I sat there watching and waiting for some small movement that would let me know he had just passed out and wasn’t in a coma or worse. I begged for another five or ten minutes, which seemed like hours, but he didn’t stir an inch.
    “Okay. Just go in, see if he’s okay, and come right back out. Promise?”
    She nodded.
    “And, whatever you do, don’t try to wake him up.” She was halfway down the steps before I finished my sentence.
    She knocked at the back door and looked up at me. I shook my head at her because he hadn’t moved. She opened the door and disappeared inside the house. An eternity passed before I finally saw her tiptoeing into the drinking room. She inspected him closely, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when she picked up his wrist to check his pulse. She gave me the okay sign as she waved at me with his limp hand, before she tucked it in close to his chest.
    I knew for sure there’d be trouble when Sara Jane picked up the picture of Emma that Winston held all the time and gave me a funny look. I was up out of my chair, waving like mad for her to get out of there, but she would just pick something else up, look at it, and laugh or just point to it, like I could see through her eyes.
    I thought I would die when she started up the stairs. Pretty as you please, she went into his bedroom, turned the light on in the closet, and stayed in there for at least a hundred years, stepping out from time to time to flash one of Emma’s frocks up so I could see it. I was sure this was God’s way of getting back at me for plundering a dead woman’s things.
    Finally, she went back downstairs. Before she left, she threw a little white crocheted blanket over Winston and came back to the porch.
    “He’s fine. He’s just drunk,” she said, real nonchalant.
    “I’m gonna kill you, Sara Jane Farquhar. I can’t believe you went in there and took the man’s pulse.”
    “Oh, Zora, he’s so drunk I could have sat on him and pretended to ride him down the beach, and he never would have known it. Boy, he’s tall.”
    “You almost gave me a heart attack going through his things. You know I told you what would happen if you got caught.”
    “First of all, the man couldn’t wake up even if he wanted to. Second of all, we needed to make sure he wasn’t dead or anything because you promised your teacher you’d look out for him, and I think she would call this looking out for him. And third of all…don’t you want to know what I found?”
    I was so keyed up over the whole life-and-death thing and the possibility of getting caught that the thought had not even occurred to me. But as soon as she said those words, I had to know what was in that house.
    “Let’s see,” she said, knowing she had my full attention, “where should we start? Well, the kitchen looks like nobody lives there except for the unwashed glasses in the sink, good crystal glasses. Waterford. I turned them upside down and looked. There’s hardly anything on the counters and the only thing in the refrigerator was an old box of baking soda his wife probably left there.”
    She laughed when she saw my eyes roll over her detailed inventory of the kitchen.
    “There’s lots of pictures in the hallway of the two of them in different places. Some of them were taken in Europe, I think, and then there were a lot taken at the beach, but not the beaches here, rocky beaches.
    “The drinking room smells like a bar, but it’s furnished real nice. I don’t think he had much to do with that. Looks mostly like stuff that a woman would pick out. But my God, Zora, that man is gorgeous, even in a stupor.”
    My heart felt like it was going to jump out of my