Read Runny03 - Loose Lips Online

Authors: Rita Mae Brown

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Runny03 - Loose Lips

BOOK: Runny03 - Loose Lips
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Praise for Rita Mae Brown’s delightful novelsfeaturing
the unforgettable Hunsenmeir sisters …

LOOSE LIPS

“[Brown] does an admirable job of portraying the effects World War II has on a small American town…. [The] characterizations of Louise and Juts are acutely realistic.”


Arizona Republic

“Brimming with Brown’s comic sense of social posturing and missteps, her rich novel lets readers laugh with her at the personal foibles that seem to loom so large in small-town settings.”


Booklist

“Time has honed Brown’s literary skills but not lessened her love for these characters.”


Library Journal

“Surprises … come from Rita Mae Brown’s comic timing and her affection for eccentrics.”


Seattle Times

SIX OF ONE

“Joyous, passionate, and funny. What a pleasure!”


Washington Post Book World

“No matter how quirky or devilish, Brown’s people cavort in an atmosphere of tenderness…. It is refreshing to encounter this celebration of human energy.”


Chicago Sun-Times

“Brown has some of the same effervescent yet secure trust in her local characters that Eudora Welty feels for hers…. When history nicks them, they slap right back.”


Kirkus Reviews

“A lively and very lovely book.”


Publishers Weekly

BINGO

“This is vintage Brown.”


Publishers Weekly

“Delightful … Rita Mae Brown is still a hoot.”


Philadelphia Inquirer

“Bingo
beams with Brown’s fondness for her characters and her delight in the oddness of the world of Runnymede.”


Boston Herald

“Joyously comic.”


People

“Longtime fans will welcome back Nickel Smith, this time coping with a surprising passion…. New ones will flock to
Bingo’s
vividly drawn characters (like the lustful Hunsenmeir sisters) and tart, loving humor.”


Self

“Hilarious, superbly written fiction.”


Booklist

“Genuinely funny.”


Los Angeles Times

Books by Rita Mae Brown
with Sneaky Pie Brown

WISH YOU WERE HERE
REST IN PIECES
MURDER AT MONTICELLO
PAY DIRT
MURDER, SHE MEOWED
MURDER ON THE PROWL
CAT ON THE SCENT
SNEAKY PIE’S COOKBOOK FOR MYSTERY LOVERS
PAWING THROUGH THE PAST
CLAWS AND EFFECT
CATCH AS CAT CAN
THE TAIL OF THE TIP-OFF
WHISKER OF EVIL
CAT’S EYEWITNESS
SOUR PUSS
PUSS ’N CAHOOTS
THE PURRFECT MURDER

Books by Rita Mae Brown

THE HAND THAT CRADLES THE ROCK
SONGS TO A HANDSOME WOMAN
THE PLAIN BROWN RAPPER
RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE
IN HER DAY
SIX OF ONE
SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT
SUDDEN DEATH
HIGH HEARTS
STARTING FROM SCRATCH: A DIFFERENT KIND
OF WRITERS’ MANUAL
BINGO
VENUS ENVY
DOLLEY: A NOVEL OF DOLLEY MADISON IN LOVE AND WAR
RIDING SHOTGUN
RITA WILL: A MEMOIR OF A LITERARY RABBLE-ROUSER
LOOSE LIPS
OUTFOXED
HOTSPUR
FULL CRY
THE HUNT BALL
THE HOUNDS AND THE FURY

In memoriam
Johnny Holland
June 14, 1983-January 2, 1999

PART ONE
1

L
ife will turn you inside out. No matter where you start you’ll end up someplace else even if you stay home. The one thing you can count on is that you’ll be surprised.

For the Hunsenmeir sisters, life didn’t just turn them inside out, it tossed them upside down, then right side up. Perhaps it wasn’t life whirling them around like the Whip ride at the fair. They upended each other.

April 7, 1941, shimmered, a light wind sending Louise’s tulips swaying. Spring had triumphantly arrived in Runnymede, which straddled the Mason-Dixon line. The residents of this small, beautiful town, built around a square before the Revolutionary War, waxed ecstatic since springtime warmth had arrived early this fateful year. Probably every year is fateful to someone or other, but some years everyone remembers. On April 7, though, Fate seemed far away, shaking up countries across the Atlantic Ocean.

Julia Ellen, “Juts,” slammed the door to her sister Louise’s house. She pursed her lipstick-coated lips and blew a low note then a higher note, like a towhee bird. Snotty bird-watchers like Orrie Tadia Mojo, Louise’s best friend from her schoolgirl days, called it a Rufous-sided towhee. Juts always pronounced it twoey, since it uttered the note twice.

Hearing no response, Juts whistled again. Finally she yelled, “Wheezer, where the hell are you?” Still no answer.

Juts had celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday on March 6. She’d always possessed megawatts of energy, but as she zoomed through her thirties she accumulated even more energy, the way some people accumulated wrinkles. The only person who could keep up with her was Louise, four years older; since Louise lied shamelessly about her birthday everyone “forgot” her exact age except Juts, who held it in reserve should she need to whack her sister into line. Cora, their mother, remembered also but she was far too sweet to remind her elder daughter, who was having a fit and falling in it over turning forty. This momentous occasion had just occurred on March 25. Even Juts, out of pity, pretended Louise was thirty-nine at the birthday party.

Both sisters roared through life, although they roared in different keys. Juts was definitely a C major while Louise, an E minor, could never resist a melancholy swoon.

Juts stubbed out her Chesterfield in the glass ashtray with the thin silver band around the edge.

“Louise!” she shouted as she opened the back door and stepped out.

“I’m up here,” Louise called from the roof.

Julia craned her neck; the sun was in her eyes. “What are you doing up there? Oh, wait, why should I ask? You’re singing ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”

“I’ll thank you to shut your sacrilegious mouth.”

“Yeah, yeah, you walk on water. I came over here to take you to lunch at Cadwalder’s but you’re such a pill I think I’ll go by myself.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“Why not?”

Louise hesitated. She loathed asking her younger sister to help her because she knew she’d have to pay her back somewhere,
sometime, and it would be when she least wanted to return a favor.

“Oh.” Julia tried to conceal her delight as she spied the white heavy ladder behind the forsythia bushes, a rash of blinding yellow. “Gee, Sis, how awful.” She started walking away.

“Julia, Julia, don’t you leave me up here!”

“Why not? I can’t even crack a joke around you but what it gets turned into a spiritual moment by Runnymede’s only living saint. Oh, let me amend that, by the great state of Maryland’s only living saint.”

“What about Pennsylvania?”

“We don’t live in Pennsylvania.”

“Half of Runnymede is over the line.”

“You mean over the top, don’t you?” Julia crossed her arms over her chest.

“You know what I mean.” Irritation crept into Louise’s well-modulated soprano.

“Pennsylvania is so much bigger than Maryland, kind of like a tarantula compared to a ladybug. I’m sure there are lots of living saints in Pennsylvania, probably in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but then again—”

Louise cut her off. She knew when Juts was heating up for one of her rambles. “Will you please put the ladder up?”

“No. Mary and Maizie will be home from school in two hours. They can put it up.”

Louise’s younger daughter, named after Julia Ellen, had been given the nickname Maizie to distinguish her from her aunt.

“Now listen, Juts, this isn’t funny. I’m stuck and those noisy kids might not hear me when they get home. Put the ladder up.”

“What do I get out of it?”

“Maybe you should ask what you don’t get out of it.” As Louise edged toward the roofline, little bits of asphalt sparkles skidded out under her heels.

“Bet it’s getting hot up there.”

“A tad.”

“What are you offering me?”

“No more lectures on your smoking or drinking.”

“I hardly drink at all,” Julia snapped. “I am so sick of you claiming that I drink too much.”

“I have yet to see a Saturday night that you don’t fill with whiskey sours.”

“One night out of seven—it’s Saturday night, Louise, and I like to go out with my husband.”

“You’d go out whether he was here or not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you can’t live without male attention and if I were your husband I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”

“Well, you’re not my husband.” Julia dragged out the heavy ladder but didn’t prop it against the gutter of the roof. “How come your nose is out of joint, anyway?”

“Isn’t.”

“Is.”

“Isn’t.”

“Liar.”

“You expect me to be Mary Sunshine when I’ve been stuck on this roof for hours.”

“What are you doing up there, anyway?”

“There’s a bird’s nest in the chimney. I removed it.”

“Any birds in it?”

“No, although I’d let them stay until they were big enough to fly. Honestly, Julia.”

The exasperation in “Honestly, Julia” told Juts it was time to strike. “I’ll put this ladder up if you give me that hat you bought last week.”

“The one from Bear’s department store in York?”

BOOK: Runny03 - Loose Lips
11.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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