Read Crescent City Connection for Free Online Page A

weirdo and I hope you rot in hell. Why the fuck do I
care what your damn politics are?
    “Nooo!” she said, drawing it out, as if shocked out of her mind. “I don’t believe it.”
    “Hey, I saw the light. I bet you thought it would never happen.”
    “Did it—” she couldn’t think of the phrase “—Did it… uh… come in a flash of…” Of what?
    “You making fun of me?”
    She was feeling a little odd, as if she couldn’t quite follow the conversation.
    “Making—uh—fun? Of course not, I wouldn’t…” Her hands felt slightly numb and her brain was just… not… revving… up.
    At the last minute, she got it: the Coke.
    The can slipped through her fingers and started dribbling out its contents as a flicker of fear passed through her. Till now, she had thought only of making her move, of biding her time until the right moment.
    She saw that she had underestimated her adversary.
    The fear left and as she went under, she felt a darkness, a heaviness, a cottony weight descend upon her, and she recognized it.
    She knew it.
    It was her old friend Depression.
    * * *
    Skip arrived home to find Steve glued to the television like the people in the airport, riveted by news of Billy Hutchison’s assassination.
    “Oh, no. Not you, too,” she said.
    “Hey. Me and the whole world. You mean you don’t want to know about this stuff? It’s not every day the good guys get somebody. Refreshing for a change.”
    She sat down. “You’re kidding. Right?”
    He laughed and pulled on a long-neck Dixie. “Reality check here. This is me, Steve. Not some raving redneck.”
    She got up again, breathing easier. “Yeah, well,” she muttered, “lines are getting a little blurry.”
    “Tell me there’s not a piece of you that’s going, ‘Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.’”
    She winced.
    “See. There is. You don’t want to think about it, but there is.”
    “It’s creepy. It gets you on a real childish level.”
    “I know. I think I’m going to go make a peanut butter sandwich.”
    “I’ve got to get ready for a healing.”
    As she stood in the shower, it occurred to Skip that Steve hadn’t even asked her how it went with Aunt Alice. When she came out, the phone was ringing.
    It was Layne: “Do we have to wear, like, black robes or anything?”
    “They didn’t mention it.”
    “Okay. I’m at the Big House. Kenny’s dressed up in a little suit and tie, all ready for weirdo-church.”
    She heard Kenny in the background: “Hey, man, come on.”
    He was probably wearing jeans but Layne had hit on a central truth about him: Kenny was a born Good Boy. He just couldn’t help it, which Skip thought must be impossibly annoying to his rambunctious sister, Sheila. Yet he wasn’t a goody-goody at all.
    Somehow, he instinctively understood grown-ups’ rules, and for some reason had no wish to break them. She didn’t get it, having been not a bit like that as a child. Either she’d instinctively gotten everything wrong, or she was so appalled by what she was expected to do that her subconscious simply filtered it out, with the result that she felt like an alien in her own family. She was the child of brazenly social-climbing parents who used their children to get them into the right parlors. Skip had a way of becoming embarrassing once her parents were in—knocking over the ancient porcelain, perhaps, or innocently asking little Eugenie’s mom why she didn’t put vodka in everyone’s iced tea, since she always took hers that way.
    She still hadn’t mastered the mores of Southern womanhood and probably never would.
    Being a police officer took up a lot of the slack, since she wasn’t expected to spend all day backbiting or arranging flowers. Also, it was so eccentric a job for an Uptown girl, she could more or less march to her own tune.
    Sheila was a lot like Skip. She meant well, she was just clumsy.
    Beyond all that, Kenny had something more than social instinct—he had an abiding sweetness and