Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

to stop her fingers from pretending to fold and unfold invisible gum wrappers while she sat in the pew staring up at the image of Christ shouldering the cross. Behind him, his disciples looked worried, while other onlookers appeared to be jeering. She wished her daddy had left the soldier out of it, the one who was poking Jesus with a spear, trying to make him stand up, but her daddy said it didn’t work that way: “Some things you cannot change, not even with money.”

At home there were barely any rules at all because home wasn’t a place where they had to impress strangers. Delia and her brother could do almost anything they wanted, and there was a lot of laughing and running and sliding down the wide bannisters. There were ranch hands to joke with, and the general chaos of a house that has its own cook and maids who were constantly saying things like “I just mopped; go the other way around in those muddy boots.” There were inside dogs and outside dogs but only ever outside cats—because her brother was allergic, but they were needed to chase mice in the barn. Delia loved the cats and would go outside to snuggle them, but they weren’t used to being snuggled, and once she’d gotten a long scratch down her arm that got infected. She’d had to get a special shot because of it.

“Cat scratch fever,” said her brother. “You’re going to start drooling and then crawling around on all fours and your hair is going to fall out.”

Delia started to cry.

“I’m just kidding,” he said, because he hated it when Delia cried. “Here, I got you some new red gum wrappers, what do you say? It’s cinnamon flavor. I found it at that huge grocery store in Casper, when Daddy took me with him last time. Please, Delia, stop crying.”

Delia’s gum-wrapper chain was almost four feet long by the time she was seven. It was the same year she’d been given the important job of carrying the incense down the aisle during Easter services. Her brother was an altar boy already, holding the bucket so the priest could sprinkle holy water on the congregation, and they’d needed another set of hands. She could see the proud gleam in her mother’s eye, and was extra careful to do it exactly right.

Delia loved church. She loved the fresh-cut flowers on the altar and the way the light played with the stained glass, making the colors splash like a rainbow across her brother’s white robe. She loved the smell of incense, and that day, because of her job, she was bathed in it. She threw back her shoulders and stepped carefully, slowly swinging the censer back and forth, back and forth on its chain. She moved only her eyes to glance sideways at her mother when she got close to her family’s pew. Delia knew she had been specially chosen to do this important thing, and the look on her mother’s face told her that God thought so too. Or at the very least, everyone else in the church should be thinking so.

She felt like the holiest person in the world, walking serenely in front of her brother and the priest while the whole town watched.

The new nanny was told to wash Delia’s hair twice that day because the first time it wasn’t shiny enough to be seen from the very back pews. Her mother was keenly aware that that was where Lavinia Johnson would be sitting all alone, or with her eighty-five-year-old mother, whose eyesight wasn’t very good. Delia had heard the ranch hands talking about Lavinia while they smoked outside the barn and she sat, unnoticed, in the hay with Tom Tom, the mouser.

“She’s a beaut,” Hank had said, “and now that her husband’s bit it, she comes with a fair-sized wad.”

The other ranch hands had chortled and nudged Hank, while Delia wondered what it was Lavinia’s husband had bitten. Or maybe she’d misheard and something had bitten him, like a rabid dog? (That really would make you crawl around and drool and act generally wild.) But either way—whether he’d bitten or been bitten—it clearly wasn’t good, unless you were his wife, who was now rich with life insurance money. Delia didn’t know what that was either, but every time her mother was on the phone gossiping with Delia’s aunt—who’d followed the wrong guy (so it was said) and now worked in a twenty-four-hour diner in Colorado, which Delia’s mother really lost sleep over—she lowered her voice a certain way specifically on those words, life insurance money.

Before Lavinia’s husband died, the Johnsons had lived simply, like everyone else in town, but now Lavinia and her mother had expensive coats and a new car, and they were moving to a bigger place with a lot of acreage, because she’d invested in a new technology called a wind turbine. Town was where people lived if they could only afford to rent. People who lived on ranches or had those funny-looking drills like hammers poking out of the ground that they leased to the oil companies, or now, like Lavinia, invested in wind farms, these were the people who came to Delia’s parents’ dinner parties.

The poor husband who’d bitten it had never been to one of the parties, because the Johnsons weren’t those kind of people when he was alive.

On dinner party nights, Delia would sit in her room making her gum chain and notice who was coming and going outside her window. If someone was invited, they were what her mother called “the right kind of person.” One night Delia had seen Lavinia emerge from a brand-new car with her mother. They both wore long evening gowns that also looked brand-new. Hank had been scrubbed up, along with another ranch hand, and they were escorting guests from the cars to the front door. Delia giggled a little, seeing Hank with his hair plastered flat against his skull and no Stetson