Steve

Dear Sister,

How are things with you? Harla and Darla ask about you constantly. Really, and some of the questions can be very embarrassing. Don’t be surprised if I don’t call you late some night, long distance, and put one of em on so you can answer some of the questions they ask me about you that I couldn’t answer if I was Jenny Jones herself.

Lester’s Sister, Cherie, has resurfaced and is in worse shape than ever. You remember how pitiful she was and his Momma was always so upset when she showed up at family gatherings and such. First there was that convict, Lonnie that she was married to that had been a Marine or somethin and then went nuts and he kept all kinds of guns and ammo and bayonets and stuff in a footlocker under their bed. He treated her just horrible and started drinkin beer about 8: o’clock every mornin. He finally got shot up and put away for life in a Burger King stand off with the S.W.A.T. team where he was holdin the whole place hostage or somethin.

No, now come to think of it that was his brother that done that. Lonnie shot out the tires of an armored truck at a Piggly-Wiggly in Buckholtz, Texas. After he’d been in prison for part of his eighty-year sentence she got one of those mail order 60-dollar divorces, like you see advertised in the Green Sheet. That was the last she heard of him.

Wadn’t two weeks later she married some guy and they opened up a little hole-in-the-wall bar. They both stayed drunk as hootie owls for the next five years or so ‘til they finally lost the bar. When they came for Thanksgiving one time, we saw the floor of the backseat of their Plymouth Fury, was strewn with liquor bottles piled as high as the seat. She found out he was still married to his first wife and had five kids by her, and one by her thirteen year old niece. I don’t know if she had to get a divorce under those circumstances or not. Doesn’t seem worth a trip to the courthouse anyway.

She went to AA for a while. After that and was a grocery checker at the Henke-and-Pillots for a couple of years. She got let go over some big trading stamp scandal. They figured out that she was scammin em with the S& H green stamps. Does seem we remember her givin a lot of blenders, lamps, and ashtrays as gifts during that period.

Well, it was just after that when she was a nightshift Waitress, at the all night Steak and Eggs, that she met Warren. He was some kind of horrible old disabled vet of a thing. He stunk to high heaven, he had brown pointy teeth, and he wore the same forest green leisure suit with white top stitching every day. He had heavy black plastic coke bottle lens glasses and he always wore an acrylic western bola around his neck, with a real stinging scorpion suspended timelessly in mid-sting.

We saw them gettin a butane tank refilled for their trailer one time and I told the girls to get in the car because I couldn’t stand the way he was lookin at them. He always chain-smoked Carltons, and he coughed and wheezed like his lungs were already Swiss cheese.

Oh, and did I forget to tell you that he always bragged that he knew Little Jimmy Dickens and that he had given him his boots? Lester said that they could have been Little Jimmy Dickens boots all right cuz it looked like his feet were crammed about half- way into em and he was walking on the sides of em.

Well anyways, it turns out that this awful Warren guy burned up in their trailer one night while Cherie was bowlin with friends. He must of fallen to sleep with a Carlton hanging from his lip, it dropped and ignited the leisure suit which caught the Lazy boy and spread to the K-Mart criss-cross Pricilla curtains and so on.

Cherie is under suspicion because she had applied for some of that life insurance on Warren from Ed McMahan by callin a 1 800 number on T.V. just a week before and she deposited Warrens January Government disability check on her way to the bowlin alley. I guess that does look kinda bad for her.

So she’s stayin with us ‘til she gets things together. I hate to say it, but sometimes I wish the police would just come get her in the middle of the night. She is such a bad example for Harla and Darla. She chains smokes Pall-Malls, regulars. She doesn’t wear a bra and she doesn’t say excuse me when she passes gas, which is about every five minutes.

Once when she broke wind in the car she laughed half cigarette cough and half cackle and told Darla " Well Shit, Aunt Cherie’s done cut herself a big ol stack of cheese. It’s a good thing I don’t wear no drawers. I would ‘a spotted em good.’ I endure this type of thing each and everyday with her. I want her out of my house. I’m sorry to dump this all on you, but you can see how things are. I just don’t know what I’m a gonna do.

Call me sometime or at least write back. Remember we love you, anyway.