Free Shem Creek by Dorothea Benton Frank Page B

the cabinet, okay? I’ll get glasses.
    “ Sure, Gracie said.
    “The silence from the sink area was deafening. She was scraping carrots with a vengeance. Gracie gave me an elbow and mouthed, What’s going on? It’s all good, I mouthed back, giving her the okay hand sign. I opened the cabinet where the glasses used to live and they had been replaced by vitamin pill bottles and dried spices. So I said something like, Hey! Where are the glasses?
    “ Over there, Patti said and pointed to the other side of the kitchen. The plates are over there too.
    “ Why’d Dad move everything? Gracie said.
    “ He didn’t, I said, I’ve got five bucks that Patti Elliott did. That’s what women like her do. They move in and take over. I was mumbling loud enough for her to hear because I was now officially furious. I mean, who did she think she was?
    “Gracie stopped breathing and looked at me in surprise. Full assaults were not part of our plan. We had agreed to be just obnoxious enough to drive them crazy, but not rude enough to truly piss anybody off. Patti stopped and turned to us.
    “She had her hand on her hip and there we stood, waiting for Miss Chitlins to rip us a new one. All she said was, Your daddy doesn’t cook. I cook. So, therefore, I rearranged the kitchen to suit me. Y’all got a problem with that? Let’s hear it, right now.
    “ Makes sense to me, Gracie said, and I wanted to kill her for agreeing with Patti. No problem here .
    “Both of them waited for me to say something. Whatever, I said with a trace of a sneer and felt lousy for giving away a point. But, let’s face it. We still had to get through Thanksgiving dinner, dishes, Friday, Saturday, and we couldn’t get out of that hellhole until Sunday when you came back. That was a long time to concentrate on being obnoxious, even for us. And, stupidly, we hadn’t calculated in the part about Patti Elliott having a mind of her own. Who knew?
    “Anyway, I realized Gracie and I were going to need an escape strategy. Being in the house twenty-four-seven was going to be too much. So I decided I’d find the newspaper and check all the listings. Maybe we could go to the movies Friday night. I would call around and see if I could get us a ride to the football game on Saturday. Sunday, I would sleep until noon.
    “I took the dishes and set the table with Gracie, whispering to her that we needed to talk. She pointed upstairs.
    “ Gonna go unpack, I said out loud to anyone who cared to listen.
    “ Me too! Gracie said.
    “We passed Dad when we went through the living room. How’s it going? he said. Perfect, I said, everything’s great . Gracie said, Yeah, everything’s great, and followed me up the steps.
    “When Dad first moved into the new house, he had set up a room for us. Twin beds, one end table, one chest of drawers—no layout from Architectural Digest, okay? But, we had a room and a place to put our stuff. All of a sudden this Patti person moves in and she’s flitting around like I don’t know what, decorating everything in sight with a monkey-something. So when we opened the door to our room we should not have been surprised to see that everything was changed. But we were. Our bedroom was now an office slash storage room, with moving boxes piled up to the ceiling.
    “ Maybe we’re in the wrong room? Gracie said. Wasn’t this our room?
    “ Try next door, I said.
    “She opened the door and peeked in. Aw, God! Aw, shit! Lindsey!
    “She stepped aside for me. I took one look and said, Oh, hell! The bedroom had been completely redecorated for us. There were pictures of the Backstreet Boys over my bed and a poster of Christina Aguilera over Gracie’s. The beds were covered in these wild geometric, primary colored, tacky comforters and pillows. I thought I was going to throw up on the lime-green carpet. So Gracie says, What are we gonna do? And I said, We’re gonna raise some hell, that’s what. What did she do? Go through all our stuff?
    “Gracie