Read Mockingbird for Free Online Page A

ever since then had carried the spark plug as a lucky charm.
    The platter he carried over to the table was laden with four deep casserole dishes and a red clay Dutch oven. Astonishing scents crept out from under the covers and made my mouth water. La Gonzales, who had the virtues as well as the vices of the old-style Mexican mother, was an incomparable cook. “We have brought just a little something, chica, ” she said, coming over to me. The hands that clasped mine were firm and soft and warm as dinner rolls. “You poor thing, with your mother passed away, now you must look after everyone, sí? We have just a few chili rellenos, and a plate of tamales, a chicken mole and some rice and in there a little pig,” she said, pointing at the Dutch oven.
    Her eyes rested a moment longer on the table, and a frown settled over her face. She let go of my hands. Her frown deepened. She reached out to the three boxes of beautiful cakes and pastries Candy had picked up, and poked one with a finger fat and mottled like a breakfast sausage. “Store-bought?” she asked, looking at Candy. “Your sainted mother is dead, your sister is making the plans, the calls, is a comfort to the father, and you have only store-bought on the table? ”
    â€œ Mamá! ” Carlos said.
    â€œ La madre fallece, ¡y compran panecilfos! ”
    â€œ Entre ellos, no es igual, Mamá. ”
    â€œ Y cuando paso a la más allá, ¿que vas a traer a la mesa? ¿Una caja de Kentucky Fried Chicken y un Milky Way? ”
    Candy looked murderously at Carlos, as if this were somehow his fault. “When you die, Señora Gonzales,” she said, “I promise I will cook a feast.”
    d
    Slowly the garden began to fill up. Visitors continued to arrive on our doorstep, more than I had ever imagined. Women who had come to Momma for advice or winning Lotto numbers or for curses on their cheating husbands, a couple she had helped elope, a woman she had hidden in our house for a month to escape her abusive boyfriend, the manager and stylist from her beauty shop, friends of Daddy’s, people from Friesen Investments, and many others I could not place. Everyone brought flowers or, more often, food, and soon our long farmhouse table was laden with potato salad, devilled eggs, coleslaw, barbecued brisket, chicken and dumplings, chicken sopa, meatloaf, pecan pie, lemon pound cake, sopapillas still warm from the vat and sprinkled with icing sugar, green beans with sautéed almond slivers, mashed potatoes with cream and brown gravy both, shrimp étouffée and red beans and rice, a rust-red jambalaya seething with okra and onions, and a growing array of spreads and jams and jellies put up in Mason jars by the older women of Momma’s acquaintance: plum preserves and apple butter, pickled onions and banana peppers, and from Momma’s oldest friend, Mary Jo, an extra jar of the things she gave us every Christmas: jalapeño jelly for Daddy, the special chow-chow that I loved on burgers and hot dogs, mustang-grape jam for Candy. Last of all, a pot of the Mexican mint jelly Momma used to love to slather on her pork chops and lamb. “For your mother, wherever she is now,” Mary Jo said to me, and gravely I accepted it.
    Mary Jo had known Momma forever. Her secrets were the only ones Momma ever kept, and I suspect the opposite was also true. Mary Jo’s husband had left her and his eight-year-old son for his secretary when I was eleven. If Mary Jo heard from him after that, we girls did not know of it.
    Mary Jo had worked at Sears for a time, but now stayed at home stuffing envelopes. The last time we had taken her for dinner, before Momma got too weak to go out, Mary Jo had claimed to be able to tell the astrological signs of our fellow diners from the thickness of their ankles. Later on she had remarked, in a loud voice, that a gentleman two tables away gave clear evidence, in the set of his neck and