The Sisters of Glass Ferry
Page 1
Praise for Kim Michele Richardson’s Previous Novels GodPretty in the Tobacco Field
“A powerful coming-of-age story . . . This beautifully textured novel raises many challenges for its main characters to overcome, and as it comes to a close, many surprises. Saying any more would ruin it for you.”
—Southern Literary Review
“Kim Michele Richardson aptly portrays the impoverished life of the hill people with her images of the beauty yet hardship of the mountains as well as the way this particular world experienced discrimination in the sixties.”
—The New York Journal of Books
“Filled with the music of Appalachia, the wrath-of-God discipline of a sinner trying to keep a youngster on the straight and narrow, and the bred-in-the-bone dignity of a downtrodden community so secluded that its barefoot children don’t even realize they’re considered ‘poor,’ GodPretty in the Tobacco Field, a memorable story of secrets and scandal, reckoning and redemption, is fine Southern fiction.”
—Historical Novels Review
“A great piece of work.”
—Bill Burton, Host of WFPL’s “Morning Edition”
“Richardson’s brilliant writing made me feel as though I were transported back in time to poor parched Nameless, Kentucky, and actually there witnessing this poignant heartfelt story. To be able to do that to a reader is a sign of a truly gifted novelist.”
—Charles Belfoure, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Architect
Liar’s Bench
“You’ll hear echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird in this haunting coming-of-age story . . . Beautifully written, atmospheric and intricately plotted, Kim Michele Richardson’s debut novel will stay with you long after the last page is turned.”
—Susan Wiggs, # 1 New York Times bestselling author
“Richardson’s debut novel will keep you riveted until all the loose ends are tied.”
—Kentucky Monthly
“This glorious debut novel is one of an unexpectedly fine crop of recent and new Southern fiction . . . Liar’s Bench succeeds on many levels. As a coming-of-age story, it is splendidly realized and uplifting. As a portrait of a Southern community painfully stumbling into the age of racial and gender equality, it is penetrating and convincing. It is a high energy action tale. Ms. Richardson’s evocation of the sensory world is supremely effective: much of any reader’s delight will be rooted in savoring the sounds, smells, tastes, and fragrances that enhance her captivating vision of a typical Southern small town during two linked periods of its history.”
—Southern Literary Review
“Readers of Southern fiction won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.”
—Ellen Marie Wiseman, author of What She Left Behind
“Liar’s Bench is one of those rare books I wish I had written.”
—Ann Hite, author of Ghost on Black Mountain and Georgia Author of the Year 2012
Books by Kim Michele Richardson
Liar’s Bench
GodPretty in the Tobacco Field
The Sisters of Glass Ferry
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
THE SISTERS OF GLASS FERRY
KIM MICHELE RICHARDSON
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Praise for Kim Michele Richardson’s Previous Novels GodPretty in the Tobacco Field
Books by Kim Michele Richardson
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2017 by Kim Michele Richardson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-0956-1
eISBN-10: 1-4967-0956-X
First Kensington Electronic Edition: December 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0955-4
For
Jeremiah and Sierra
with love always.
. . . rock and water, taken in the abstract, fail as completely to convey any idea of their fierce embracings in the throes of a rapid as the fire burning quietly in a drawing-room fireplace fails to convey the idea of a house wrapped and sheeted in flames.
—Sir William Francis Butler
CHAPTER 1
Every year Mama has baked her a strawberry birthday cake. And for two decades now that cake has sat on the sunshine-yellow Formica counter for one week in June unsliced, the plump pink roses atop the creamy home-churned icing with powdered sugar-coated berries, beckoning another year for Patsy to return home, mocking her silence, her absence.
* * *
“Flannery, I just know this is the year,” Mama said in that summer of 1972.
“How come, Mama?” Every person in Glass Ferry, Kentucky—in all of Woolson County even—for every year since 1952, knew sixty-one-year-old Jean Butler had been saying these same things until another cake went stale and got tossed into the garbage.
“I just know it,” Mama insisted. “I can feel it somehow, in my bones, in this sweet June air. This is the year we’ll slice Patsy’s cake, all three of us.”
Mama quieted, and Flannery emptied the box of pink birthday candles onto the table and began counting them to put on the cake. More than once, the house awakened and popped, distracting Flannery from her tally.
Breezes pushed through the screen door, slapping at darkened halls and sneaking into dusty corners of the century-old two-story. The bones of the house groaned and creaked like tired homes do from time to time—growled low like it was pushing something away with a warning—like it knew something bad was about to slip inside and soil the sugar-dusted air.
Flannery rubbed at the tightness building in her neck. Mama had always said houses knew things before people did—“knows things only the soul knows”—and that homes like theirs could feel things same as a dog catches the silent clamors lost to the human ear.
> “Grab the napkins, Flannery,” Mama reminded, scattering the choir of airy protests.
Flannery shrugged off her apprehension and crossed over to the sideboard. Sloping floorboards dipped, rasping under her feet. She hadn’t been back to Glass Ferry in a year, and had mostly forgotten how different this rambling old country house sounded compared to her loud city apartment. That’s all, she presumed. Flannery never missed making it home when the elementary school dismissed her students just in time for another birthday celebration.
Year after year the quiet of the house, the countryside, all of it, still managed to lull her into its own sleepiness until an unexpected jarring bumped the silence and jerked her back.
She dug through the table linen drawer and handed Mama the embroidered strawberry napkins. “I need to get out of my nightgown and get dressed,” Flannery said, dusting flour off her gown.
“Oh, baby girl, wear your prettiest. We’re going to have a big celebration,” Mama chattered, “bigger than the Independence Parade even.” She laughed as she smoothed folds into the cloth napkins and stacked them neatly beside the cake. “Hard to believe my twins are going to be thirty-six this year. Lord, how time flies. Seems like just yesterday when you and Patsy were in your cradles. You up and left for college and married—”
“Mama . . .” Flannery warned that her divorce was not on the table for discussion.
“Speaking of time”—Mama pointed to the old electric daisy clock hanging on the wall—“this morning is getting away from us. We haven’t even made the punch. Why don’t you start on that before you change into your dress.”
Flannery glanced at the kitchen clock and then down at her daddy’s old windup Zenith wristwatch on her arm, finding a solace and satisfaction in her cheating. Ever since Flannery was born, she had been stealing—stealing time same as she did Patsy’s pearls back then—setting all the wall clocks and wristwatches exactly eight minutes ahead. And when Flannery visited Mama every year for the fake birthday celebration, she’d make sure to do the same to her clocks even though Mama fussed the day into tomorrow trying to break her of it. Mama always said, “It’s the devil’s doings, and it doesn’t make sense to thieve from the Lord’s hours when you’ll just have to pay ’em back.”
But that’s not what her daddy had taught her. Nuh-uh. The very thought of that final Reckoning Day was why Flannery stayed precisely eight minutes ahead, looking over her shoulder for those lagging minutes when the devil might try to collect.
Flannery followed Mama’s most hopeful gaze to the wall. Mama would track those circling black hands most of the day, keeping a vigilant eye on the time and the foyer too, first to move the hands back to their proper time and, second, to welcome Patsy when she burst through the door.
Several times Mama caught Flannery looking to the foyer and gave her an optimistic grin. Instead of smiling back, Flannery turned away. She wanted to believe, but after all these years there was nothing left, just a plait of hope that had been twisted, rubbed too many times, tangled into a useless, knotted wish that would never unravel.
Flannery knew the quiet morning would slip into a quieter afternoon, and soon the lull of evening would gather a cold, silent darkness. Tonight she would find Mama tear-stained, asleep at the kitchen table, plumb wore out from watching and waiting. Flannery would rouse her mama from the chair, take off her glasses, and convince her to go to her room—helping her to drag her aged bones and aching heart to bed until the next year—the next time Patsy’s birthday rolled around.
Time. If only Flannery could snatch some of it back for them.
“Flannery.” Mama pulled her to the task and pointed to Patsy’s strawberry cake. “Are you sure I can’t make you one, or maybe bake your favorite—cherry pie? It’s your birthday too, you know.”
“I do love your cherry pie. But this’ll do, Mama.” She plucked an orange from the fruit bowl and rolled it in her hands. “Doc says no added sugar for us borderline diabetics.”
Mama picked up the cake knife and nodded, knowing her youngest had inherited the sugar problem and other troublesome traits from her daddy. “The diabetes took him from us too soon, before the twins’ fourteenth birthdays,” she told everyone the half-truth.
Mama hummed “Happy Birthday” while shining the blade with the tail of her apron. “Happy birthday, dear Patsy.” She plucked the words, sang them soft and warbly. “This is the year, baby girl. Flip on the radio. Let’s have some music.”
1972 didn’t feel any different than last year for Flannery, or the one before that, or any of the others. She clicked on the radio, turning the knob to get a clear station.
Cocking her head, Flannery caught the announcer saying something about a rust bucket being pulled out of the Kentucky River downstream from the Palisades. “. . . this morning when a fisherman found . . . near Johnson’s boat dock . . .” She stretched an ear closer to the radio speaker and turned up the volume. “. . . shedding light on the decades-old disappearance. . . Sheriff Hollis Henry of Glass Ferry went on to confirm the mud-caked Mercury . . .”
Mama’s knife clattered on the sunlit linoleum, hammering its glint across the walls and pinning the clock’s slow-sweeping hand into the final stolen minute.
CHAPTER 2
Patsy
June, 1952
The day swept its last hour into the cemetery. There, alongside the forgotten churchyard in the washed light at the end of Ebenezer Road, she’d buried her secret.
Just months before, Patsy Butler hadn’t any secrets to keep. Not adult ones anyway, and only the kind an almost sixteen-year-old would primp and parcel: an admirer’s note passed in history class, a young boy’s wanting touch, maybe a stolen kiss sneaked behind the football bleachers, all locked onto a mostly dreamy-lipped grin and safeguarded to chalk-dusted walls.
But now there was a burdening hush-hush in Patsy’s soft green eyes and a quivering in her young hands that belonged to the old.
Patsy crossed the room and opened the bedroom window to let the early June air sift through the curtains. Sinking back down onto her vanity stool, she dipped the eyeliner brush into a teacup of water and swished it back and forth across the black cake powder. For the second time Patsy tried to draw a line onto her eyelids to give herself a perfect cat-eye look.
“Patsy and Danny sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then marriage, and then o’ then, there’s a baby carriage!” Her twin sister’s stupid little tease struck like a cold blade.
“Dammit, Flannery . . . just hush,” Patsy hissed, peering closer at the mirror and inspecting the sweep on her wing-painted lids. Satisfied, Patsy reached for the lipstick.
“Oh, did I spell it wrong? F-O-R-N-I-C-A-T-I—” Flannery sang slowly as she hung over her sister’s shoulder.
Patsy batted her off with a light hand. Ever since their mama said Patsy could go to the junior prom with Danny Henry, Flannery had been pestering Patsy because Flannery didn’t have a beau to take her. But this particular tease cut deeper. Patsy and Danny had been arguing about it recently, it being putting out. Patsy wondered if Flannery had overhead their whispers on the porch. It had to be that, only that.
“What’s eating you?” Flannery asked.
“You. Knock it off, tadpole.” Patsy pressed her lips together to seal the paint, dropping the tube onto the wooden vanity. She glanced into the mirror and cast a warning eye to Flannery.
“Don’t call me that,” Flannery said. “Hey, that’s mine.” She snatched the lipstick and tossed it into the vanity’s drawer, then plopped onto one of the twin beds in their bedroom.
“Someone’s acting like a brat,” Patsy declared.
“That’s because someone is working somebody’s shift down at Chubby Ray’s, scooping tons of ice cream and making a million cherry lime rickeys and serving stacks of chili dogs to her whole junior class while somebody and everybody has a big-to-do prom to go to.”
“Flannery, you’re a doll to do this.” Patsy sighed, leaned back, pat
ted her sister’s shoulder.
“Well, you’ve already missed enough days. I wouldn’t want Chubby to fire you.”
“A living doll,” Patsy said, sort of meaning it this time.
Flannery softened a little. “I guess you’d do it for me.”
“I would,” Patsy said. “But I wish you would’ve thought about letting Hollis take you to the prom. Then ol’ Chubby Ray wouldn’t have made you work my shift.”
“Hollis Henry is a senior, a dumb one who failed first grade—nearly nineteen years old now! And you know Mama ain’t allowing us to date seniors, same as Honey Bee. ’Sides, I never much cared for him—I don’t want to double-date—and I don’t want your date offering up his brother as a pity date for me.”
Their daddy, Beauregard “Honey Bee” Butler, or Honey Bee, as Patsy and all who knew him called him, had a lot of silly rules for his girls, Patsy thought. Rules that were still calling from the grave. It wasn’t fair, she felt. Honey Bee never wanted the twins to be around older boys, yet, he’d let them skip second grade and go straight into third when the teacher advised it. Honey Bee’d enjoyed boasting how doubly-sharp his little girls were.
“But that’s only because Honey Bee told Mama not to let us,” Patsy reminded Flannery. “He’s been dead over two years.” There was a relief in Patsy’s words. Honey Bee was one less worry—one less in the mess of her latest troubles.