Free Prayers and Lies by Sherri Wood Emmons Page A

what she said about Mother’s kitchen knife. Sometimes it got so bad I crept downstairs and crawled into bed with Melinda.
    None of us understood why Tracy was the way she was. She could be kind one minute and vengeful the next, looking like an angel and then the devil’s own stepchild, all in the space of a heartbeat. But we all had our theories.
    Daddy opined loudly and often that it was hormones—typical adolescent shenanigans. “We were lucky with the first two,” he’d laugh. “Now we’re paying for it big-time!”
    Mother didn’t try to explain away Tracy’s behavior. In fact, she didn’t talk about it at all. But we all knew it scared her. She watched Tracy with a kind of panic on her face, her eyes wide, her mouth set in a tight line. As Tracy’s fits grew fiercer and more frequent, Mother’s hair turned an ashy gray and she began the bimonthly ritual of having it colored black again. Crow’s feet edged her eyes, and the furrow in her brow sometimes looked so deep you wondered if you couldn’t plant potatoes in it. She was always patient with Tracy, crooning in a singsong voice that everything was okay, would be okay. But I don’t think she believed it. I know I didn’t.
    Nancy and Melinda said Tracy was crazy, like Kelly Morgan’s crazy grandma who had to go live in a hospital—but they never said it to Mother and Daddy. They whispered it to each other and sometimes to me, and I believed them.
    But none of us ever mentioned Tracy’s fits outside our family. Mother had a saying: “You don’t hang underwear on the outside line.” Our family’s underwear hung neatly and properly on a clothesline in the basement to dry. And our secrets stayed neatly cloistered within the family, where they belonged. That was our way for a long time, until we couldn’t hide them anymore.
January 25, 1970
Dear Bethany
Hi! I got your letter you wrote today. I never got any mail before that was for me. I like the straberrys on your paper. Tell Aunt Helen I said thanks from me for getting you that. Now I will know when I look in the mail box if there is a letter from you.
Daddy is working on the loft at our house. It will have 2 rooms. 1 is for Caleb and 1 is for me. The baby will have my old room and Caleb will finally have his one room insted of sleeping on the sofa. He is helping Daddy bild it. Rite now there is a big hole covered with blue plastick over the living room. Mama hates the mess. But she will be glad to have the loft done. She is sick a lot and she is looking fat in the tummy. Caleb said she looks like she’s been streched out like a rubber band. Mama smacked him on the hed when he said that. He just laffed at her. He sure does make her mad.
That is all from here. Write back to me soon. Tell Tracy and Malinda and Nancy I said HI!
Love your cousin
Reana Mae
P.S. Buttons died, but Mama is so happy, she don’t even care much.
    “How’s Reana Mae?” Mother asked when I came downstairs.
    “She’s just fine,” I answered, flopping down beside her on the couch.
    “Watch out for my yarn,” she warned. I pushed her skeins of yarn aside, brown and gold. She was knitting a sweater for Nancy in the high school’s team colors. Nancy was a varsity cheerleader, and we all went to the basketball games on Friday nights. All of us except Melinda, who told us every week that basketball games were for pork-heads. None of the really cool kids went, she said. Of course, Melinda had not made the cheerleading squad, so her opinion might have been biased.
    “Bobby Lee is building the loft, and Reana Mae and Caleb will have their rooms upstairs. Caleb is helping.”
    Mother’s brow furrowed slightly. “I wonder how long Caleb will be staying with them?” she said, looking up at my father. He was sitting in his La-Z-Boy watching the evening news.
    “Did you say something?” he asked, never taking his eyes from the screen.
    “I was just wondering how long Bobby Lee and Jolene are going to have Caleb with them,”