NEXT TUESDAY, FEB. 27, The Sometimes Sisters, Harper, Dana and Tawny will all meet up together at the resort for the first time in ten years. A little excerpt about when Harper first arrived:
Harper slowed down at the liquor store but didn’t stop. Her
sisters, Tawny and Dana, would judge her as it was. If she came in with a brown
paper bag under her arm, they’d have a field day. First right-hand turn before
the bridge and there it was—twelve cabins located behind the combination
convenience store and café. Then just a short distance from the cabins was a
small white two-bedroom house. That’s where Granny Annie lived and where Harper
and her two sisters had come to visit for a month every summer—but that all
came to a screeching halt the summer before Harper’s sixteenth birthday in
August.
Beer, bait and bologna--what Granny Annie called her store. It did offer a little more than that, with
bread and other snacks and a shelf of over-the-counter medicine like sunblock
or sunburn lotion, for those folks who forgot to bring those items with them. They also had milk and soft drinks in the refrigerator section, a big minnow
tank, and a special fridge to hold stink bait, plus two gas pumps out front to
keep the boats as well as the cars and trucks all fueled up and ready to go.
She could see each shelf in her mind’s eye as she drove
around the back of the store to the café entrance. Uncle Zed cooked up the best
food in all of North Texas at the café, and Flora took care of the cleaning.
Three old folks had kept the place going for decades, and now one of them was
gone.
She parked her truck and leaned her head back, shutting
her eyes. She’d made it. No spare tire and the gas tank, as well as her wallet,
were empty. “On fumes and prayers,” she whispered as she inhaled the pungent
aroma of the lake water along with the smell of freshly mown grass and the
first roses of summer, all mixed together with cigarette smoke. Lake Side
Resort, as the faded sign above the door proclaimed, had not changed a bit.
Uncle Zed rounded the end of the porch and waved. His
green eyes looked out of place in that ebony-black skin. His curly hair, once
black as coal and cropped short, now had a heavy mixture of white sprinkled in
it and was a little longer, but he would be at least seventy by now—maybe even seventy
one or seventy two. He and Harper’s grandmother and late grandfather were all
the same age. He still looked like he needed rocks in his pockets to keep a
spring breeze from blowing him into the lake, but he’d always been a beanpole
and he’d always worn bibbed overalls. Some things didn’t change with time—thank
God.
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