Storm Season
Violet Lassiter passed me the heavy blue-willow plate with a remarkably steady hand for a onehundred-year-old. "Have a cookie, Miss Skerritt."
She didn't have to twist my arm. Fresh from the oven, the cookies smelled heavenly.
"They're better with nuts," she added in apology,
"but Bessie can't have "em, so the rest of us have to suffer."
"You eat too many sweets, anyway," her eightyfour-year-old sibling, Bessie, countered.
"What do you think—" Violet accused her with a roll of her eyes "—that I'm going to shorten my life?"
Taking a cookie, I sat on the screened back porch of the modest cement-block home with the two elderly women, who were apparently unfazed by the ninety-degree heat and suffocating humidity of the September morning. Violet, tall and gangly with thick white braids wrapped around her head like a crown, wore a heavy sweater over her cotton housedress.
Bessie, short and lean, was also dressed in a cotton shift and a cardigan, plus bright-pink sneakers and heavy flesh-toned nylons rolled just below her knees.
I'd first encountered the Lassiter sisters last June when Bill Malcolm, my ... read full excerpt from Storm Season ebook
