Free A Gentle Rain by Deborah F. Smith Page B

singed in the oven. Nothing like the combined smell of burnt bread and Lula's fake designer perfume to put a man off his coffee.
    "Take the bacon to the table, please-ma'am," I told Dale. Dale frowned at Lula. She read Bible storybooks-the kind with pictures-and was pretty much convinced Lula was Jezebel.
    Dale hustled out of the kitchen carrying a pile of extra-crispy pork in a black iron skillet. I tossed my oven mitt at a tabby cat who was trying to sneak a paw into the margarine tub.
    "Out of there, Grub." He just purred at me. I grabbed a hammer and some tacks, pulled a flattened cereal box from the trash can, and went to shore up the walls of a hundred-year-old Cracker farmhouse against king snakes.
    Mac walked out of the store room with the snake curled comfortably around his big forearm. Lily limped beside him, admiring the catch. "Red, yellow and black. King snakes are so pretty. Like Halloween candy. The poor baby was just hungry, Ben." Every needy critter was a'poor baby' to Lily. She hadn't named the gray mare, yet. Just kept calling it Poor Baby.
    "That king snake's why we haven't seen a single palmetto bug in the store room yet this spring," Miriam called. "I say leave it be. It's cheaper than a can of roach spray." She went back to spearing her greasy eggs. We ate in the kitchen at a ten-foot picnic table built from leftover construction lumber. Seven hands, two aging mermaids, Joey, and yours truly could fit around that makeshift dining spot with room left over. Joey commanded one end in his wheelchair.
    He waved one ofhis favorite breakfast treats, a mix-and-bake miniature muffin with real-fake blueberry flavoring. "You didn't burn this one, Benji."
    "Yeah, it escaped."
    Joey dunked the burned muffins in saw palmetto honey. Everybody else said my muffins tasted like wall plaster with blue specks, but Joey, God bless him, loved `em. Joey chewed and swallowed. "Maybe the snake'd like you to cook him some breakfast, Benji."
    "Naw, we don't want to kill him."
    I stepped into the storeroom and squatted down, poking the potato bag aside with my hammer. Mac stood in the doorway, stroking the snake's bright-ringed back. "I'll t-turn him loose in the g-garden." He and Lily went out through the back screened porch, her cooing to the snake.
    I found a hole the squirrels kept re-chewing in the wall underneath a bottom shelf and tacked the cereal box over it. That should work for, oh, at least a day. I heard Joey talking to Miriam at the table. "I'm extra-tired this morning," he said. "Will you turn my oxygen up for a few minutes?"
    "Sure, hon," she said.
    He was getting weaker. Day by day, little by little. I squatted on the storeroom floor, my head down, my shoulders hunched. The main attic fan, whumping in the front hall ceiling, caught my thoughts and wouldn't let go. He's dying, it said. He's dying, you're helpless, he's dying. I heard Mac and Lily's loud footsteps hurrying back. I pretended to look for other squirrel holes.
    Lily stuck her head in the storeroom. "Ben," she cried. "My poor baby's run away."
    I figured she meant the gray mare, not the snake.
    Damn. It was going to be that kind of day
    Kara
    At the state line
    I said a mantra to myself every day. No sugar. No trans fats. No processed foods. Love the planet. Eat lean, eat raw. When you grow up being called Porky Wbittenbrook, you learn to revere broccoli.
    But that morning, I was seduced. Seduced by the most venerable lure of a Southern interstate: Stuckey's pecan log rolls. They are a gooey, chewy, sugary roll of white molasses and crushed pecans. The recipe dates to the 1930s kitchen of Mr. and Mrs. Stuckey, when the teal-blue roofs of their Stuckey's roadside pecan emporiums began to pop up along the raw concrete automotive paths snaking thorough the countryside.
    Modern Stuckey's have survived the hype of lesser competition and are flourishing. I stopped on the interstate just inside the Florida line that morning, squinting from a restless night in a