Free The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat by Edward Kelsey Moore Page A

Out of respect, she would wear a black dress. But she chose magenta shoes, a matching belt, and a white hat with clusters of red and black leather roses around its wide brim to go with it. The little black dress was cut well above the knee and had a tiny slit on the right seam. Clarice would hate it and would have to bite her tongue to keep from saying so. But Barbara Jean wasn’t wearing it for Clarice. She was wearing it for Big Earl.
    When she was a teenager and was ashamed of having to wear her mother’s flashy, trashy hand-me-downs, Big Earl made a point of telling Barbara Jean that she looked pretty every time he saw her. Not in a dirty old man way or anything. He would just smile at herand say, “You look divine today,” in a way that made her feel as if she were wearing haute couture. Or he would see her come into the restaurant in one of her mother’s shiny, too-short skirts and he’d turn to Miss Thelma and say, “Don’t Barbara Jean look exactly like a flower.” Anywhere else in town, she might have been dirt, but inside the walls of the All-You-Can-Eat, she was a flower.
    Long after Barbara Jean had choices and knew better, she would occasionally pick one of the brightest and the tightest from her closet and sashay into the All-You-Can-Eat on a Sunday afternoon just to give Big Earl a reason to grin and slap his knee and say, “That’s my girl.” On those days, she left the All-You-Can-Eat feeling twenty years younger than when she’d walked in. So, for Big Earl she was going to squeeze into a black dress she wouldn’t be able to take more than a shallow breath in and she was going to look damn good in it, or die trying.
    Barbara Jean knew she should get to bed, but she didn’t feel sleepy, just a little woozy still from the vodka. She didn’t remember getting the bottle from the liquor cabinet, but there it was on the table next to the Bible. That was her pattern. When her mind was too full of thoughts—usually about the old days, her mother or her son—she would reach for either the Bible or the bottle and end up with both in her lap before the night was over. She would sit in one of her burgundy chairs and drink vodka from one of the antique demitasse cups Clarice had found for the house. She sipped and read until the memories went away.
    Barbara Jean always drank vodka, partly because whiskey had been her mother’s drink and she swore she’d never touch it. Also, vodka was safe because people couldn’t smell it on you. If you stuck to vodka and you knew how to control yourself, nobody talked trash about you, no matter how many times you filled your demitasse cup.
    She put the cap back on the vodka bottle and returned it to the liquor cabinet. Then she took her cup and saucer to the kitchen and left them on the counter for the maid to deal with in the morning. When she returned to the library to turn out the lights, she contemplated reopening that troublesome Bible. She was in just that kind ofmood, and it wouldn’t take long. After a few vodkas, Barbara Jean’s form of Bible study was to close her eyes, open the book on her lap, and let her index finger fall onto the open page. Then she would read whatever verse was nearest the tip of her nail. She had done this for years, telling herself that one day she would land on just the right thing to turn on some light inside her head. But, mostly, she spent countless nights learning who begat whom and reading of the endless, seemingly random smitings the Bible specialized in.
    She thought about the day to come and decided to go on up to bed. Rather than disturb Lester, who was a light sleeper, she would lie down in one of the guest rooms. If he asked in the morning why she hadn’t come to bed, she would tell him that she had gone straight to the guest room after staying up late to pick out her outfit for Big Earl. If she looked well rested enough, maybe he wouldn’t suspect that she had spent yet another night in the library drinking and