Free The Funeral Dress by Susan Gregg Gilmore Page B

ain’t going nowhere. Hand me the keys. I’m the one going to see Miss Leona. Not you.”
    “Miss Leona’s dead. Thrown out the windshield. Shit, girl.”
    “Shut up, Nolan. Give me the damn keys.”
    Nolan held his hands to his head. “Girl, don’t do that,” he said with a softened but exasperated tone. He focused on Emmalee even though his eyes had yet to open.“That woman don’t look right. I know you cared about her, but hell, girl, let Mr. Fulton do his work. I’ll take you later. They ain’t putting her in the ground today no way.”
    “Don’t need you to take me. Don’t want you to take me,” Emmalee said, rapping the end of the stick against the wood floor. “I mean what I say. Give me the damn keys.”
    Nolan rubbed his right hand across his stubbled chin. He hadn’t taken a razor to his face in weeks and yet his beard was short, mostly black, with just a sprinkling of white. After drinking heavily, Nolan always looked feeble, not the mean and threatening man he had been only hours ago. Again, she rapped the end of the stick on the floor and waited for an answer.
    “All right,” he said and swiped at the stick, but his reach fell short.
    “The keys, Nolan.”
    “Coat pocket,” he muttered and rolled onto his left side, turning his back to his daughter.

E MMALEE
    F ULTON -P ITTMAN F UNERAL H OME
    Cars and trucks loaded with men passed Emmalee as she drove into town. She figured most of them were headed over to the DuPont plant in Chattanooga where they made nylon for tires. There was a time when Nolan had talked big about working there. Said he could make a lot of money. But that’s all it was. Just talk.
    Emmalee peeked down at the baby, nestled in a cardboard box set next to her on the seat. Kelly Faye stared back at her mama and cooed dulcet notes. Emmalee gently rocked the box and drove on toward town. The nurses had given her a proper seat for the baby to ride in, but Nolan dropped it on the sidewalk in front of the hospital the very next day. He pulled a box from the Dumpster behind the Ridgeview Trail Apartments. “It’s fine for hauling a baby,” he told Emmalee.
    Emmalee glanced at the dials set in the panel abovethe steering wheel. “Damn,” she said. The tank’s gauge registered empty, and she carried only enough change in her pocket for maybe a half gallon. She didn’t have far to go; Fulton’s was only a mile ahead. But with the baby in tow she didn’t want to be walking home in the cold. She leaned on the steering wheel as if encouraging the truck along. The PURE station sat on the very next corner. As the truck rolled toward the pumps, a bell rang out.
    A young woman walked out of the garage wearing blue jeans pushed into a pair of heavy black work boots. She waved to Emmalee and flashed a toothy smile. Sissie Boyd had worked at her mother’s filling station since she was thirteen, less than six weeks after her father died of a heart attack while checking the oil filter under a customer’s hood. Sissie was a year older than Emmalee, but she graduated valedictorian of her high school class. She left three months later for college somewhere in Nashville but came home three months after that. She told her mama she wasn’t going back, and she’d been at the filling station ever since.
    Emmalee had always envied Sissie, and not because she pumped gas and discussed spark plugs and distributor caps with the men in town as if she was their equal. It was Sissie’s loss that Emmalee envied. Her father had died, not her mother, and Emmalee wished she had been that fortunate. She knew it wasn’t right to think so. Mr. Boyd had been a good man. But nothing about life and death was ever right or fair.
    Sissie motioned for Emmalee to roll down the window. She flung her arms inside the truck and peered across the seat. Sissie’s fingernails were cut short and thetips were stained black with grease. Her hair was long and smooth but she kept it tucked on top of her head underneath