She’d thought of everything hadn’t she? I wonder how happy she would be if I broke my fool neck trying to squeeze through the bathroom window to escape?
Or maybe I should try shimmying down off the balcony. Too bad I was scared spit-less of heights.
Chapter 8
I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out how to get out of this pickle. Mama has done some hinky stuff in her time, but this takes the cake.
It’s worse than when she showed up to my sweet sixteen, with that buck tooth heathen Tobias Treat, and declared that he was my beau for the evening.
Took me damn near a year to live that down in front of my friends. She apparently hadn’t learned her lesson yet.
And if she wanted old Jet to get some of what I gave old Tobias, to get that jackanapes off my butt, well then bring it on mama. I haven’t kicked a male in the gonads in a mighty long time.
I started getting hungry just about sundown, or at least that’s when the hunger pains got so bad, that I was about to fall out.
I’d heard Jessie Mae, our cook, talking about her fried chicken and grits earlier, before mama went blotso. If she made me miss that fine cooking she was gonna get it too.
I don’t know how yet, after all I’m not a savage, I don’t go around beating up on my own mama, but maybe I can put shaving cream in Melissa’s shampoo, that’ll teach them.
I know that doesn’t sound very much like a college graduate, from one of the finest families in the state. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
I’ve been the reigning princess in these parts my whole life, on account of my daddy was the biggest man around.
Our family’s been in the shipping business since cotton was king, and we never hit a snag yet as far as I can tell.
Then again, they usually kept the women folk out of such matters, so we wouldn’t know. I went to school for business, though mama did her best to get me to change my major to something more ladylike, probably flower arranging. She was plum out of her mind.
As the oldest of daddy’s children, I’m fixing to take over things when the time comes. That’s what we’ve always talked about, since I was knee high to a grasshopper.
Daddy promised, and if he went back on his word and made me marry that…person I’ll do to the Durant plantation what Sherman did to Georgia.
That’s just the way I am. I’m set in my ways and daddy knows this. He thinks I’m too young to help him out of this bind he’s found himself in.
Yet it doesn’t appear that he thinks I’m too young to get married to some hick from the sticks and bred like a breeding sow to carry on his family name. Hah
I threw myself back down on the bed, and I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew, I was smelling that chicken, and it was mighty close.
I sat up on the edge of the bed and looked around. There was a tray of food on the bedside table. There was chicken and cheese grits with gravy and nice fluffy biscuits, with honey in a pot next to it.
It couldn’t have been there long, because there was steam still rising from it. I was too hungry to think about who brought it in and how, so I just up and dug in.
I ate like a JD hog, until I was about to make myself sick. Now I’m not one of those city girls I eat, the only thing is, something’s a little off about my metabolism, because no matter how I eat I don’t gain an ounce.
In fact, the only thing that grows on me, is my chest, it’s embarrassing. Southern men for all their talk about wanting a woman with meat on her bones, sure do a lot of salivating over my chest.
By the time I was sixteen it got so I couldn’t have a conversation with one of them without turning red in the face, because they couldn’t keep their eyes in the right place.
Chapter 9
I pushed the tray away and went to see about my bath. I might as well make myself comfortable, because there was no telling when mama would come to her senses; and with daddy joining the enemy camp, I was in for a long haul.
I ran my bath and chose my favorite lavender scented bath salts to add to the water.
Usually at bath time, I have a whole routine; I check myself over in the mirror, to make sure I didn’t have a pimple on my butt at the very least.
See that I wasn’t getting one of those mustaches like aunt Vi had. I was deathly afraid of that one, and have been checking for years now.