Читать книгу Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League - Jonathan Odell - Страница 21

Chapter Fourteen

ONE WING HANNAH’S

Vida reckoned that if the woman who plopped down uninvited at her table wasn’t drunk, she was within hollering distance of it. She called herself Sweet Pea, and her shiny black hair, greased down and hot-combed, hugged a plump face glistening with sweat. She grinned at Vida like they were best friends.

“You ought to get out of them fields, honey,” the woman lost no time advising. “What are you? Nineteen? Twenty? You wasting yourself. Gal, you do a lot better in town. The mens like your type.”

Sweet Pea smiled brightly at Vida with a mouth full of gold teeth and then winked. Motioning toward Vida’s chest with an empty Mason jar, she said, “You young and pretty, even with that head of drawed-up hair. And you probably toting some nice boobies in that sack you wearing.”

Shifting self-consciously in her chair, Vida yanked at her loose calico dress, trying to pull out some of the slack. Then she stuck her ragged hands under the table and out of sight. It vexed her to think a looped-up stranger could tell straightaway that she had been reduced to being a fieldworker. Especially in a smoke-crowded juke lit by two dim bulbs dangling from a tar-paper ceiling.

Vida made a show of searching the room, partly to defy the busybody stare of her table companion and partly to locate her brother. All around her couples were close-dancing in the cigarette haze to a blues-scarred voice rising from the Seeburg.