The Sometimes Sisters(7)

Chrome tables with yellow tops could seat four to six people or be pushed together for a bigger crowd. Napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, and a bowl of small packets of sugar and sweeteners were arranged in the middle of the tables. Chairs used to match the tables, but they’d been recently recovered in shiny red plastic. Black-and-white tile covered the floor and was so shiny that Harper wouldn’t have a problem eating off it.

“Hamburgers smell amazing. Why’d you make all these desserts?” Harper asked.

“Done told Tawny. She can explain it to you,” Zed answered as he headed back into the kitchen.

She whipped around to see Tawny on the other side of the room. The precious daughter who did no wrong—according to their mother—looked like hell. Tawny’s blonde hair, usually perfectly styled, with not a long curl out of place, was pulled up in a ponytail. And her eyes looked like she hadn’t slept well in weeks.

“What are you staring at?” Tawny snapped.

“Not much.” Harper turned away from her younger sister at the same time that Dana and Brook pushed their way through the door and sat down at the table where the food waited. “What’s going on with the dessert table?” Dana asked.

“Evidently Tawny knows.” Harper sat down across from Dana.

“Did you make all that, Aunt Tawny?” Brook asked.

“Humph,” Harper snorted. “If she tried to boil water, she’d burn down the whole house. The kitchen is as foreign to her as—”

“Being sober is to you,” Tawny smarted off as she crossed the room and settled into the fourth chair.

“Put the claws away.” Zed brought a basket of sweet potato fries to the table. “Or I walk right out of here for good.”

Dana gasped.

Tawny’s eyes got wide.

Harper laid down her burger and touched his arm. “Please don’t do that. We’d be lost without you, Uncle Zed.”

“The church ladies brought the desserts. Evidently they did something to upset Granny Annie a long time ago, and they’re feelin’ guilty,” Tawny explained.

“I wish they’d ride that guilt trip for a week or two,” Brook laughed. “That stuff over there looks epic.”

“Epic?” Harper asked and then bit into a burger.

“It’s the new ‘awesome’ or ‘fabulous,’” Dana explained.

“I thought everything was ‘dope’ these days. That’s what I’m used to hearing the college kids sayin’.” Harper raised her voice. “Uncle Zed, these are epic, dope, and fabulous. Come on out here and eat with us.”

“Naw, I’ll just take my meal in the kitchen where I can watch the ribs I got cookin’ for supper,” he yelled back. “Y’all go on and clean up that food and then you can get into them cakes and pies. The lawyer will be here at one thirty.”

“Yes, sir,” Brook said seriously. “So is that old truck yours, Aunt Harper?”

“Yes.” She piled lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles on her burger.

“It’s been a long time since I saw you, but I think you were driving that truck then and I was just a little kid,” Brook said.

“I’ve been driving it for a long time. Little kid, huh? What are you now, twenty-one?”

Brook giggled. “I’m fourteen. What kind of job have you been doing?”

“I worked as a bartender in one of the college honky-tonks up in Oklahoma this last time and lots of other bars before that,” Harper told her.

“Figures,” Tawny said under her breath.

“What? That I work in a bar or that it’s in Oklahoma?” Harper asked.

“Both,” Tawny said.

“Stop it!” Zed said. “Y’all ain’t been together here in nigh on to ten years. I ain’t havin’ you upset Annie with your bickerin’.”

“Uncle Zed, Granny Annie is gone,” Brook said softly.

“Honey, her body is gone, but her spirit is still here among us, so these three best be a little more civil to each other,” Zed scolded.

“I guess we can put up a front for him,” Dana whispered.

“Y’all need to remember that he’s lost his best friend,” Brook said. “And he don’t need a lot of arguing. What’s it between y’all anyway that you can’t get along?”

“Long story,” Harper said.

“Y’all here to stay?” Tawny looked up at her two sisters and niece.

“You?” Harper asked.

Dana glanced across the table. “It will all depend on what the lawyer says. If Granny Annie left the whole place to Uncle Zed, I’m going to beg him for a job.”

Zed brought out a pitcher full of sweet tea and set it in the middle of the table. “I don’t imagine you’ll have to beg.”

Harper refilled her glass and passed the pitcher to Tawny, who had always been the prettiest of the three. Petite and curvy, she had the lightest hair and those delicate features that made men follow around behind her like a little puppy dog. Surely she wouldn’t be leaving her fancy sorority her last year at the university to work at Annie’s Place and live in a cabin on the lake.

A bit of an old song played through Harper’s head. The lyrics talked about three friends and said that one was pretty, one was smart, and one was the borderline fool. Dana was smart. Tawny was pretty. That only left the latter for Harper to lay claim to, and with her past mistakes, it kind of fit her well. Besides, she’d always felt like a big old sunflower among the bed of cute little miniature roses that were her sisters. Standing at just under six feet, she had what her mother called dishwater-blonde hair and light-brown eyes. And she’d sure turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the three women around the table. Hopefully Brook would get Dana’s smarts, her aunt Tawny’s beauty, and not an ounce from the borderline fool.