Biggie and the Devil Diet - By Nancy Bell Page 0,2

that."

"Yes'm." I hoped she wasn't going to give me one of her lectures on the responsibilities of being a Wooten and living up to the family name.

I breathed a sigh of relief when Biggie yawned and picked up her bowl of peas. "I'm tired," she said. "I believe I'll just go in and have a little nap before supper."

Willie Mae got up and followed Biggie into the house. "I got to get my roast in the oven."

"I reckon I'll take a walk down to the feed store," Rosebud said, pitching his cigar butt into the yard. "I heard they got in some nice chrysanthemum flats this morning, and I aim to get some before they all picked over. Miss Biggie's got her heart set on bronze mums in that bed around her birdbath."

I got up from the steps and went to lie down on one of the big concrete buttresses that stand on either side of Biggie's front steps. The cement felt nice and warm from the sun. I was about to doze off when, plop, my cat, Booger, jumped down from the porch rail and landed right on top of me. I pressed his back with my hands until he settled down on my stomach, purring like a freight train. It was almost the end of summer. School would be starting in two more weeks. I was looking forward to the eighth grade. Life was good.

That was the last peaceful day we had that summer because the very next day an old friend of Biggie's showed up in town, and before we knew it, we were up to our necks in affairs we never should have been involved in. I blame Biggie for that. She just doesn't know how to keep her nose out of other folk's business.

1

Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Moody, came tapping at the back door just as Willie Mae was frying up a batch of beignets for our breakfast. If you've never tasted beignets, you're in for a treat. They're little square doughnuts covered all over in powdered sugar. When Willie Mae puts them, hot out of the frying pan, on my plate then dusts them with enough powdered sugar to make them white as snow, I feel like I've died and gone to heaven.

"I just got a call from Woodrow," Mrs. Moody said, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. She pulled out a chair and took a seat beside Biggie at the table. "Umm, something smells good. What is that, Willie Mae?"

"Beignets," Willie Mae said, not looking around.

"Have some breakfast with us," Biggie said. "What did Woodrow have on his mind this time?"

Woodrow is Mrs. Moody's son who lives in Wascom, over near the Louisiana line. To hear Mrs. Moody tell it, he would be president of General Motors if his wife wasn't holding him back. She says that's what you get when you marry beneath your station in life, a no-account wife and a house full of bucktoothed kids to support. Woodrow had to take a job delivering Rainbo bread to support his family instead of becoming a business tycoon the way he'd planned.

"It's Imogene, of course," Mrs. Moody said. "It seems her mother, who lives over in Marshall, lost her job at the pants factory. She's a widow, you know, since the old man drank himself to death."

"Poor thing." Biggie wiped powdered sugar off her chin. "What's she going to do?"

"Oh, she got another job right away," Mrs. Moody said. "She hired on with the gas company as a meter reader. That's the problem."

"How so?" Biggie asked.

"Well, it seems she was reading the gas meter outside the old folks home with a cigarette in her mouth. She didn't know the meter had a leak. Well, naturally the thing blew up— knocked the whole back wall out of the home, and several of the old folks went into heart failure from the shock. They said it shook cans off the shelves down at the Piggly Wiggly five blocks away."

"Was she killed?" I asked.

"Not her." Mrs. Moody held up her plate and waited while Willie Mae slid two fresh beignets on it. "That old woman is tough as boot leather. It singed off all her hair though, and she had burns on her face and arms. Anyway, now she's laid up in the hospital over in Marshall, and Imogene's got to go take care of her. Woodrow asked me to come look after him and the kids while she's