The Oleander Sisters
The Oleander Sisters
Elaine Hussey
An emotionally riveting tale of the bonds of family and the power of hope in the sultry Deep South.In 1969, the first footsteps on the moon brighten America with possibilities. But along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a category five storm is brewing, and the Blake sisters of Biloxi are restless for change. Beth ‘Sis' Blake has always been the caretaker, the dutiful one, with the weight of her family’s happiness—and their secrets—on her shoulders. She dreams of taking off to pursue her own destiny, but not before doing whatever it takes to rescue her sister.Emily Blake, an unwed mother trying to live down her past, wants the security of marriage for the sake of her five-year-old son, Andy. But secure is the last thing she feels with her new husband. Now she must put aside pride and trust family to help her find the courage to escape.With Hurricane Camille stirring up havoc, two sisters—each desperate to break free—begin a remarkable journey, where they’ll discover that in the wake of destruction lies new life, unshakable strength and the chance to begin again. Dreams are rebornand the unforgettable force of friendship is revealed in The Oleander Sisters, an extraordinary story of courage, love and sacrifice.Discover more at www.ElaineHussey.com
An emotionally riveting tale of the bonds of family and the power of hope in the sultry Deep South
In 1969, the first footsteps on the moon brighten America with possibilities. But along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a category five storm is brewing, and the Blake sisters of Biloxi are restless for change. Beth “Sis” Blake has always been the caretaker, the dutiful one, with the weight of her family’s happiness—and their secrets—on her shoulders. She dreams of taking off to pursue her own destiny, but not before doing whatever it takes to rescue her sister.
Emily Blake, an unwed mother trying to live down her past, wants the security of marriage for the sake of her five-year-old son, Andy. But secure is the last thing she feels with her new husband. Now she must put aside pride, and trust family to help her find the courage to escape.
With Hurricane Camille stirring up havoc, two sisters—each desperate to break free—begin a remarkable journey where they’ll discover that in the wake of destruction lies new life, unshakable strength and the chance to begin again. Dreams are reborn and the unforgettable force of friendship is revealed in The Oleander Sisters, an extraordinary story of courage, love and sacrifice.
The Oleander Sisters
Elaine Hussey
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To the IT Girls, with love, laughter and gratitude.
Contents
Cover (#u5aeb6c6a-a058-5c3b-8e05-e4855b5a201b)
Back Cover Text (#u5202388e-afba-5517-b69d-8e86ec81a4b1)
Title Page (#u322c0188-b3dd-5c1e-9ea5-a488b3014a2b)
Dedication (#ue6e724e8-0f86-52b4-8209-3d5cd0de7d3a)
Chapter One (#uda3b9a15-adaa-5bc1-a425-b6891eff1308)
Chapter Two (#u591bf8df-e641-51ff-8fb2-1ed494d943f6)
Chapter Three (#uafd8407f-8a4a-5336-8981-824ac885272e)
Chapter Four (#u06bfc2bd-0e6a-5194-b0ce-029e8993c8c9)
Chapter Five (#u24d5c8d0-0e79-5798-a6b9-a12fd905d70a)
Chapter Six (#u38a54a71-14e5-57f8-9d60-188343db6101)
Chapter Seven (#ue659fc8b-881b-5d0b-820c-f6a4674ca1d6)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Reader’s Guide (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ulink_aaa6eb97-5a78-5a2a-a7d6-c6413db87642)
THE DAY NEIL ARMSTRONG walked on the moon marked a summer where anything at all could happen. The brother you’d given up for dead in a war everybody hated could suddenly turn up alive, and the sister you’d protected all her life could finally be getting married. Any other woman would have been happy with the sudden turn of good fortune, but not Sis Blake. She was scared of happiness. Let too much joy seep into your life and you’d soon find yourself hunkered beside twisted wreckage wondering what you did to make everything turn out so wrong.
As if Sis needed any more evidence than her own history to tell her something awful was heading her way, the Amen cobbler cooling in the kitchen at Sweet Mama’s Café gave off the scent of secrets, a spicy smell so sharp it could cut away everything you held dear.
Still, Sis kept her troubled thoughts to herself. There was no sense spoiling things for her sister. Emily was humming as she sliced into the cobbler, serving up hope by the spoonful.
“Eat up, Sis.” Emily’s face was radiant with happiness and heat from the ovens. “It’s the best I’ve ever made.”
Sis forced herself to eat so she wouldn’t be the one who wiped the smile off her sister’s face, and Emily went back to her baking and humming, every now and then glancing out the back café window.
What was she seeing besides a backyard lit up with red and blue Christmas lights, though it was July and so hot in Biloxi the seagulls abandoned the beaches along the Mississippi Sound and pecked at Sweet Mama’s display windows trying to get inside where it was air-conditioned? Was Emily seeing a six-year-old son who needed a daddy? Was she seeing a little boy born out of wedlock and tagged with ugly rumors by a few vicious gossips Sweet Mama had run out of the café with a broom? Or was she seeing what Sis did, an endearing little boy in an outgrown Superman suit who was thriving in a family of women?
Even that worried Sis. Get too complacent and bad luck would hunt you down. The bite of Amen cobbler went down hard and sat in Sis’s stomach like an accusation.
“I’ve gotta get going or I’ll be late.” Glad for an excuse to push aside the cobbler, she hugged her sister, then hurried out the door, climbed into her sturdy black Valiant and headed toward the bus station.
Sis whizzed along the beach road, replaying the evening two weeks earlier when Emily had walked into Sweet Mama’s Café on the arm of a stranger and announced, “This is the man I’m going to marry.” Then she’d gone to every table and booth to show off her engagement ring, a stone so big it was bound to be a cubic zirconia.
Many of the diners were regulars who had watched Emily grow up, mostly at the café, shielded by the wide skirts and fierce heart of Sweet Mama. They knew how Mark Jones had gotten her pregnant, then run off to join the army to get out of marrying her, and they were happy she’d finally found somebody who would love her back.
Sis tried to be, too, but she was not the kind of woman to be swept off her feet. Emily’s fiancé was handsome in the too-slick way that made her skin crawl. Every time Sis glanced at him, he was checking his reflection in the Coca-Cola mirror behind Sweet Mama’s soda fountain.
Still, Emily had obviously seen something in her fiancé that Sis missed, so she’d trotted over to her future brother-in-law, determined to learn more about him.
“Larry, I guess you already know I’m the watchdog of the family.”
“You don’t do yourself justice, Sis.” His smile was wide and easy, this pharmaceutical salesman named Larry Chastain, who had swept Emily off her feet six weeks earlier when she’d gone to Walgreens to get some Pepto-Bismol for Andy’s upset stomach. “I’d call you Emily’s guardian angel.”
He oozed sincerity, and in spite of her reservations, Sis found herself smiling back.
“Tell me about yourself, Larry.”
“Ah, the dreaded inquisition.”
His smile was still in place, but Sis thought she’d seen a flash of irritation. Or maybe she was just looking for reasons to keep her trusting sister from racing to the altar with the wrong man.
“I’m blunt, Larry. Maybe too blunt. But I need to know my baby sister is going to be in good hands.”
“I love your sister and make more than enough money to give her and Andy everything they want and need. Emily tells me you’re a worrier, but rest assured, you have nothing to worry about, Sis.”
Emily had walked up then and whisked him off to the kitchen to meet Beulah. It wasn’t until they’d gone that Sis realized Larry Chastain hadn’t told her one single thing about himself. She stood there looking down at the floor as if she expected to see a greasy spot where he’d been standing.
What was it about Larry that set her on edge? Sis hadn’t been able to put her finger on the cause during that meeting two weeks ago, but driving along the beach road to pick up a brother who had received a Purple Heart, she wondered how Larry had managed to avoid the draft. The very idea of a draft dodger in a patriotic family where the men had served and sacrificed for their country made her want to snatch Emily up and run.
By the time Sis parked her Valiant at the bus station, she had to deep breathe in order to collect herself. It wouldn’t do for her brother to see her in this shape. She adjusted the rearview mirror in the off chance her reflection would show some magical transformation. Unfortunately, there she was—plain and chubby with a perpetual worry line creasing her forehead, and hair so curly it always looked like it had been styled by an eggbeater. Still, she tried to pat it into place, and even dug around in her purse to see if she could find a tube of lipstick, as if a little slash of red could turn back the clock. It had been two long years since she’d seen her brother, and she liked to think the sight of her would remind him of catching fireflies on summer nights and fishing off the pier and playing baseball in the backyard.
She turned up nothing in her purse but a wallet, a wad of tissue, two pieces of bubble gum and the stub of a pencil. Sighing, she pinched her cheeks, bit her lower lip to add some color and then put on a smile she hoped would make her look like a woman who had everything in the world she’d ever wanted.
As she stepped out of the car, Sis held out hope that her brother would be the one to turn her hornet’s nest of worry into something manageable, a funny story they’d all laugh at a dozen years from now when Andy was graduating from high school and Emily was baking a celebration cake at Sweet Mama’s. But Jim was leaning against the wall on his crutch, blowing smoke from a Lucky Strike into the humid evening air, his face as closed as a fist.
“Jim. Oh, my God, Jim!”
“Sis,” was all he said, and when she wrapped her arms around him, she understood that’s all he could manage. His flesh had vanished from his bones, and with it the buoyant spirit that used to radiate from him in waves that made him almost hot to the touch.
Without another word, she led him to her car and headed back to the café. He stared at the Gulf as they barreled down Highway 90, the breeze from his rolled-down window blowing his yellow hair straight back from eyes turned as glassy and unseeing as the blue china plate Sweet Mama had picked to serve his welcome-home cake. Sis’s hope flew right out the window. She imagined it sailing across the water like the favorite kite she’d loved and lost when she was six years old, before Emily and Jim were born, before their pink Victorian house across from the seawall became a place where a little girl had to grow up too fast.
“Jim, I know it must have been awful for you over there.”
He didn’t say a word, and who could blame him? Awful could hardly begin to describe it. The prosthetic leg he’d tossed into the car along with his duffel bag was a testament to the horrors he’d endured.
“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener.”
“Give it a rest, Sis. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s okay. Maybe some other time.”
That didn’t seem likely. As she turned her attention to the radio, Sis tried to keep her despair from showing. She found a station where Elvis Presley was crooning “If I Can Dream.”
Were there any dreams left in that car? Sis quickly switched to a station that wouldn’t remind both of them of all they’d lost.
“You won’t believe how Andy’s grown. And Sweet Mama’s still feisty as ever. She wanted to invite everybody in town to your homecoming, but I finally talked some sense into her. I thought it would be easier for you with just family.”
Jim turned her way with a shut-down face full of sharp angles and shadows, then swiveled toward the window to stare at the water. Was he watching the whitecaps? Remembering Vietnam? Wishing on the moon?
“Do you want to hear about Emily’s fiancé?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, you ought to. He’s a jackass.”
“They run the world.”
“Not my world, not while I have breath.”
Sis had been taking care of her family since she was fourteen and that awful accident took their parents. She didn’t plan on stopping just because Emily was trying to outrun her past by racing toward the altar. And maybe that was Sis’s fault. She’d always encouraged her baby sister to be the fairy princess in a fairy-tale world.
Sis took a sharp left in order to avoid Keesler Air Force Base. No sense giving Jim any reminders that the military had mowed the Blake family men down like ninepins, leaving only him behind to pick up the slack. Not that Sis held out any high hopes of that happening. A man who wouldn’t even carry on a conversation about his family was as likely to see after their welfare as Sis was to have somebody stop her in the street and tell her she was beautiful.
Just look at the pair of them. She was an old sourpuss and Jim was still in the killing jungles somewhere on the other side of the world.
It was a pure relief to see the café, a fine, old building of moss-covered brick, reflecting the style of the Gulf Coast’s Spanish history, shaded by a couple of hundred-year-old live oaks and lit up like a rocket ship on blast off. Christmas lights and silver tinsel circled the plate-glass windows where gold lettering proclaimed Sweet Mama’s Café, and underneath in red was etched Home of the Famous Amen Cobbler!
Beyond the front window was Sweet Mama with her coronet of silver braids and a pearl brooch on her green linen dress, laughing at something Emily had said. That was a talent Emily had—making her grandmother laugh, making everybody around her smile. Everybody except Sis, who hadn’t found much to smile about since she discovered she hated the idea of spending the rest of her life selling pies, Amen or otherwise.
The flush on Emily’s cheeks could have been excitement or summer heat. With blond curls escaping from her ponytail, she looked sixteen. A strap of her yellow sundress had slid off one shoulder, and the blue apron she still wore was dusted with flour. Even disheveled, Emily was beautiful.
Sis would never be beautiful, with or without a dusting of flour. She would never look sixteen, even if she could get her frizzy brown bob into a ponytail. She would never be the kind of woman men wanted to sweep off her feet.
Envy ambushed her, so unexpected she almost crashed her car into a live oak.
“Watch out!” Jim grabbed for the steering wheel, but Sis slapped his hands away.
“I’ve got it. I’m just excited, is all.”
How could you envy the sister you’d dressed and fed and soothed at night with silly, made-up stories so she’d sleep with the lights off?
Perhaps it wasn’t envy but longing fueled by the perspective of age. How could Sis have known at fourteen that once you set out on a path, it can take you so far from your dreams you’ll end up at the age of thirty-four not even remembering who you once wanted to be?
She’d given up everything for her family, even her name. Beth. Nobody called her that anymore. Everybody just called her Sis, as if she were nothing more than the role she played.
The sign on the door of Sweet Mama’s read Closed for a Private Party. There was nothing private about it, of course. Tomorrow, word would be all over town. Sweet Mama would tell the breakfast regulars, and Emily was too gentle to refuse details to anybody who asked. By ten o’clock, everybody in Biloxi would know that Sweet Mama had made Jim’s favorite red velvet cake, and Emily had forgotten to take off her apron and Jim had refused to wear his leg.
There it lay on the backseat of Sis’s Valiant, another piece of sand in her craw. What do you say to a brother just returning from the hell of Vietnam? Why don’t you let me strap on your prosthetic leg so you’ll look normal and Emily won’t cry? Or do you just stand there with sand drifting into your sandals while Emily races out the front door, already crying before she gets close enough to hug her twin, the Gulf breeze blowing both of them sideways?
Maybe the Gulf was blowing all of them sideways, and had been for so long Sis didn’t know what normal was anymore. She thought about a brother coming home broken and a sister smiling as she raced toward disaster. She thought about a life gone so far off track she didn’t even remember the direction she’d been going.
Best not to think too far into the future, to simply put one sandy sandal in front of the other until she was standing in Sweet Mama’s, surrounded by the smells of cake and pie and fried chicken and freshly cut tomatoes from Sweet Mama’s prize crop, just standing there silent, gnawing on a chicken leg and watching over her brother and sister as she always had; watching as Emily laughed through her tears and Jim was engulfed by the ones who loved him best and would love him always, even if he never got his mind back from Vietnam and his leg out of Sis’s car.
“Aunt Sis! Aunt Sis!”
The TV perched on the edge of the serving bar was blaring wide-open. Andy sat so close he was crossing his eyes to see.
“C’mon over! They gonna land on the moon!”
For two cents Sis would get on that rocket ship with the astronauts. And she wouldn’t care whether she found the moon or not. All she wanted was to be as far away from her current life as she could get.
* * *
Sweet Mama was relieved when Sis quit glaring over her fried chicken leg at What’s His Name and walked over to join Andy at the TV. Why, from the look on her face you’d think What’s His Name was a fly set to land on Jim’s celebration cake and Sis was a flyswatter.
Larry Chastain. That was the name of Emily’s new fiancé. Sweet Mama would write it down this very minute if she thought she could do it without getting caught. But Emily might see her and start worrying all over again about her forgetfulness. And Sis was bound to notice. That girl didn’t miss a thing. And she wouldn’t stop at calling Sweet Mama forgetful, either. She’d use the scary words senile and hardening of the arteries and dementia.
“Larry Chastain.” Sweet Mama mumbled his name, hoping it would make a lasting impression. If she forgot and called him Gary, everybody would look at her funny. And her older son Steve, the one who wasn’t dead and wasn’t Emily and Sis and Jim’s father, would start that silly talk again about signing over power of attorney.
Sweet Mama would rather be six feet under than sign over any damned thing. She’d built this place from scratch and had run it for nearly fifty years and she wasn’t about to let somebody else take over now, especially her son Steve, who only came to the café when his bossy wife allowed. Besides that, he hated pie. What God-respecting man hated pie? No sirree, Bob. If anybody took over Sweet Mama’s Café, it would be the Blake girls. Emily could make an Amen cobbler the customers couldn’t tell from Sweet Mama’s, and Sis knew more about running a business than any man Sweet Mama ever saw.
If her mind ever did go, God forbid, she’d have her granddaughters running the show and not somebody with a power of attorney, thank you very much.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sweet Mama saw Emily motioning to her fiancé to go on over and join Sis and Andy at the TV, trying to communicate with gesture and smile, as she always had, that everything was all right.
Lord God, Sweet Mama hoped so. The scent of sun-ripened peaches coming from the Amen cobbler was so sweet, if you squinted you could see bees buzzing around the crust. Sweet Mama couldn’t recall what that was a sign of, but she knew it was a harbinger of something that made her bones feel heavy. She closed her eyes, just for a minute, and as clear as a summer day she saw a swarm of bees streaking down from the mimosa tree in the backyard, aiming straight for her head. She lifted her shovel to fight them back.
“Sweet Mama.” Her granddaughter’s voice drifted through the fog. “Sweet Mama. Wake up.”
Emily was shaking her shoulder, and when she looked up at her granddaughter, it came as a great surprise that she was all grown-up instead of four years old. Momentarily panicked, Sweet Mama looked around for Sis, who was no longer fourteen, but a rather unstylish and pensive-looking woman past thirty.
“Are you all right, Sweet Mama?”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”
“In the middle of my own grandson’s homecoming party?” Sweet Mama checked for the cake to be sure she was right. “I should say not!”
Emily sat down beside her and started patting her hand. Sweet Mama was torn between snatching it away, acting all huffy that her youngest granddaughter was treating her like an old woman and leaning into her to enjoy the petting. If you’d told her ten years ago she’d ever get to the age that she needed somebody treating her like a child, she’d have slapped you silly.
Before she could make up her mind which way to act, Gary came over and interrupted the whole thing.
“Larry, darling,” Emily said, and Sweet Mama thought about her narrow escape. She’d come within a gnat’s hair of calling him the wrong name. “I thought you were going to join Andy and Sis.”
“Your sister doesn’t seem to like me.”
“Nonsense, darling. You have to know Sis. She’s just protective, that’s all.” Emily patted him on the arm. “Go on over there now, and don’t spare your charm.”
He trotted off and Sweet Mama said, “Charm, my ass.”
“Sweet Mama! What a thing to say!”
She knew it was a terrible thing to say, but she wasn’t about to admit that it had just slipped out. To make up for the many ways she was now failing Emily, she was going to give her granddaughter the best wedding the Mississippi Gulf Coast had ever seen.
Sis was another thing—as tough and unbending as the live oaks that dripped with Spanish moss in front of the café. Sometimes Sweet Mama wished her oldest granddaughter would bend a little. She wished she wouldn’t be so hard on people. And the way she dressed...Lord God, the more Sweet Mama tried to talk her out of wearing khaki slacks and black blouses all the time, short sleeves in the summer, long in the winter, the more Sis resisted.
Still, Sweet Mama knew Sis would make sure her sister got a wedding grand enough to make up for all those years wondering if Mark Jones would have changed his mind and married her if he’d made it back from Vietnam.
More and more, Sweet Mama depended on Sis to take care of the family. Any day now, she might retire and travel to some of the places she’d read about in National Geographic. She’d always wanted to, and now could be her big chance.
“I think I’ll head to Pikes Peak first,” she said.
“What?” The funny look Emily gave her said she’d done it again, gone off and said something that didn’t have a thing to do with the conversation at hand.
She racked her brain trying to figure out what the latest subject had been. Emily was now looking alarmed.
She had to say something that made sense or Emily would tell Sis, and Sis would fetch Doctor...what was his name? He was an old fart. That’s all she knew.
“You said you were going to Pikes Peak, Sweet Mama.”
“Not this very minute, silly. But I’m getting so old, I’m liable to kick the bucket any day, and wouldn’t it be nice to be up so high I could see Heaven?”
“I don’t think you can see Heaven from Pikes Peak.”
“I was just kidding.”
Feeling backed into a corner, Sweet Mama looked around for a means of escape. And there was her poor grandson, leaning against the wall as if he could no longer see his place in the family.
“Help me up, Emily, and let’s take your brother some of that Amen cobbler.”
Food, that’s all Sweet Mama could remember anymore. She watched as Emily scooped up a big helping and then put a smile on her face as she carried it to Jim.
Sweet Mama got that heaviness in her bones again, an uncomfortable feeling that could be anything from old age to angels whispering in her ear. If she could just ground herself in the café, she’d be all right.
She glanced around at the pictures on the wall. They told their own story—the history of a bakery that became a café and a woman too fierce to give up, the friendship against all odds with Beulah, who had been with her every step of the way, the ever-increasing number of patrons who carried on meandering conversations spun out like a roll of silk ribbon, linking the past to the present and binding people together as surely as tree-ripened peaches blended with fresh cherries in Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.
“Amen cobbler, Jim,” Emily was saying. “I made it.”
Fear stung Sweet Mama as unexpectedly as a red wasp. Lord, she could have sworn she made that cobbler. Hadn’t she stood in the kitchen not more than two hours ago adding peaches to the batter? Or had that been last week?
“I’m not hungry, Em,” Jim said.
“Take a little bite, anyway. It’s your party,” Emily said. “Tell me if it’s as good as Sweet Mama’s.”
The way Jim was looking at his plate, you’d think it was filled with mud pies. What do you say to a grandson who’s standing close enough to touch but is so far away he’s no more substantial than the moonlight laying a path over the water?
Beulah’s shadow fell over Sweet Mama, a huge umbrella to shield her from a downpour of sudden sorrow.
“Honey, if you don’t eat that cobbler, old Beulah’s gonna think you don’t appreciate none of this cooking we nearly killed ourselfs over.”
“You’re still a con artist, Beulah,” Jim said. “And you don’t look a day older than when I left.”
“If you keep up that sweet talk, you’re gonna have a girl before we know it.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I ain’t holding my breath. I’m gonna put out the word to the reg’lars to be looking. Now, eat that cobbler pie.”
Sweet Mama puffed up with pride as she watched Jim pick up his fork and dig in. The war might have taken his leg, but it hadn’t stolen one iota of the Blake honor. She glanced at her granddaughter’s fiancé over there with all his body parts intact, sleek as a tomcat.
“Emily, did What’s His Name serve his country?”
“Please, Sweet Mama. This is a party. Let’s not talk about that now.”
“It’s a legitimate question, Em,” Jim said. “Did he?”
Suddenly, Andy shouted, “Com’ere, quick! That’s him. There’s a man on the moon!”
Emily raced off like somebody saved from the guillotine.
“Oh, it is, sweetheart!” She sat on the bar stool beside her son, her color suddenly so high she looked as if she might be the one standing on the moon.
Even Jim moved toward the RCA TV, and suddenly the whole family was riveted by the pictures being beamed back to them all the way from the moon. Relieved that she was no longer under scrutiny, Sweet Mama poured herself a glass of sweet tea and sat at a table close enough so she could see what was going on. It didn’t look like much to her, just a bunch of blurry black-and-white images. For all she knew, this man on the moon stuff could be a big hoax.
“He looks like a monster, Mommy.”
“That’s the astronaut Neil Armstrong in his space suit,” Emily said. “Listen, Andy. You’re watching history.”
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong said.
An impossibly huge moon shone through the plate-glass windows. That a mere mortal—somebody not so different from her, except younger—was up there this very minute walking around in the moondust filled Sweet Mama with such hope the café could hardly contain it. Her grandson was home safe, one granddaughter was at the beginning of a new life and the other granddaughter had the grit and the brains to turn this café into the finest restaurant in the Deep South.
Sweet Mama looked around the room till she found the picture she sought, hanging on the wall beside the clock and dated April 1, 1921. There she was, posing behind the cash register in the bakery she’d opened herself, with Beulah as her only help.
If anybody happened to ask Sweet Mama what she thought about the lunar landing, she’d say she’d already been to the moon and was planning to go again.
Two (#ulink_f9b29e73-4183-58c3-9880-885946758457)
EMILY DIDN’T NEED AN alarm clock to wake up. She loved sunrises and rituals and the small, everyday miracles of family. When dawn pinked her lace curtains she hurried to the window to admire the sky, and then she raced back to the bedside phone to call Sis.
“Sis, are you awake?”
“I am now, Em.”
Emily grinned. Sis might try to act like an old grump, but she counted on their early morning phone calls as much as Emily did. When you love a sister, you know her songs as well as her secrets. You know what makes her shatter and what it takes to put the pieces back together. You understand her as if you were standing inside her skin, counting the beats of her heart.
“I’ve decided to have a summer garden wedding,” Emily told her sister. “In Sweet Mama’s backyard.”
“It’s a disaster area.”
“It’s beautiful. All we need are a few chairs and some white satin bows, and it will be gorgeous.”
“Good Lord, Emily. Are we talking about the same backyard? It’ll take a ton of fertilizer, six weeks of rain and a flat-out miracle to get Sweet Mama’s backyard even halfway decent.”
“It might take all that if I didn’t have you, Sis.”
“Are you trying to flatter me?”
“Is it working?”
“A little bit.”
Sis’s sigh was audible, and Emily felt a prick of guilt.
“Listen, Sis, I don’t want to cause too much trouble. You need to spend time with Jim instead of fretting over a garden wedding.”
“If you want a garden wedding, that’s what we’ll have. Jim’s going to be fine. I won’t have it any other way.”
“He didn’t seem so fine to me, Sis. Bring him to the café today so we can feed him and fawn over him.”
“I don’t think he’ll come.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to come down to the café so he can be with all of us?”
“Because...” Sis hesitated. “Because he’s as stubborn as I am.”
What had she been going to say? Emily was certain it was something frightening Sis had edited out in order to protect her.
“You’re not stubborn, Sis, just certain. I wish I had more certainty.”
“If you’re not certain about Larry Chastain, don’t marry him.”
“I’m not talking about Larry.” Or was she? Emily felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction, as if she’d gone to the store for a carton of ice cream only to get home and discover the container was empty. “Let’s not be serious today, Sis. We have so much to celebrate!”
“That we do, Em. See you at the café.”
Emily dressed quickly, then went down the hall to check on her son. He was out of bed, wearing his Superman suit. It was from last Halloween and too short, but he didn’t care. A little boy planning big adventures with his favorite teddy bear, Henry, didn’t worry about things like dressing to the nines and combing his hair.
Andy hadn’t seen her yet, and Emily stood in the doorway, watching as he picked up the picture from his bedside table, Captain Mark Jones, smiling at his son from a silver frame.
“I love you right back, Daddy,” Andy said, then planted a big kiss on the picture.
That was her fault. She’d told Andy that Mark Jones loved him best. Was it wrong of her to tell such a lie? Wrong to let her son believe his natural father had wanted him, had loved him more than anything in the world?
She hoped that having a real daddy in the house would cause Andy to let go of the phantom father.
Andy spotted her and raced to hug her around the legs. When she knelt to fold him close, she put her face in his hair and inhaled the scent of shampoo and summer and little boy dreams.
“You think my daddy heard me?” Andy wiggled out of her grasp.
“I don’t know, Andy.”
“Maybe Heaven’s got big speakers like the ice cream truck.”
“Maybe so.” Emily picked up the pajamas Andy had dropped on the floor. “Did you comb your hair?”
“I forgot.” Andy raced off to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, making so much racket he sounded like a Little League baseball team. “I got important things to do, Mommy,” he called.
“Like what?” Emily shook out his sheets and tucked the corners into his bed.
“Build a rocket ship.” He poked his head around the door frame, his freshly wet hair sticking out at such odd angles he looked as if he’d had a big surprise. “If Nell Arms Strong can go to the moon, I can, too.”
“Why, yes, you can. You can do anything you set your mind to, Andy.”
“I might see my daddy up there.”
The weight of being a single mother descended so quickly Emily had to struggle against defeat. Where was that line between making sure your son felt loved by his natural father and letting him live in a fantasy world?
“Let’s not talk about that right now, Andy.” She caught her son’s hand, and he grabbed his old teddy bear. “Pretty soon you’ll have a real daddy in the house.”
Andy balked in the doorway, digging his heels into the shag carpet and sticking his head around the door frame with the anxious posture of a child searching for monsters.
“Andy, what are you doing? We don’t have time to lollygag.”
“Looking for a Larry Alert.”
Emily sighed. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Andy to warm up to Larry. Heaven knows, Larry had tried, too. He’d promised to take Andy fishing and to get him a new baseball mitt. He’d even said they could build a fort together in the backyard.
“We’ve talked about this, Andy. Until the wedding Larry will always sleep at his house, and then after, he’ll sleep here and we’ll be a family.”
Andy crossed his eyes, his way of saying I don’t want to listen to this. Maybe she’d been wrong to let him spend so much time at the café. Sis and Sweet Mama and Beulah encouraged every little thing he did. But still, what was she to do? Day care cost too much, and in her opinion, if you didn’t have family, you didn’t have anything worth talking about.
She went downstairs to her kitchen, which was her favorite room in the house, and began to fix breakfast while Andy raced around with his arms spread and his red cape flying out behind him. In a minute she heard him digging around in the pantry.
“What are you doing, Andy?”
“There’s a ginormous box in here. Big enough for me and you and Henry to go the moon.”
He dragged out the box their new television set had come in. A gift from Larry. Just one more piece of evidence that Emily knew what she was doing by marrying a man who could not only provide for her family, but was generous besides.
Andy raced back into the pantry and came out with an empty Tide box.
“I’m gonna take Aunt Sis, too. She knows ’bout boats and baseball and putting worms on hooks.” Andy heaved the Tide box into the TV box. “You got any more boxes? It’s gonna take lots for a rocket ship.”
“I’m sure there are some at the café. We can bring them home this evening.”
“I’m gonna build my rocket ship at the café. Aunt Sis can help. She knows lots of stuff.”
“Yes, she does. Andy, you need to eat your breakfast so we can leave for the café. I don’t know how the biscuits will turn out if I’m not there to make them.”
“You reckon Aunt Sis and me and Henry can finish the rocket ship today?”
“Good heavens, Andy. Why don’t you let it be a summer project?”
“’Cause I might need to make a quick getaway.”
The words settled into Emily’s heart like stones. What if the innocent recognized truths hidden from grown-ups?
* * *
Morning came softly to the Gulf Coast, tipping the waves with gold, rousing the terns from their nests along the beach and sending seagulls soaring across the water, looking for unsuspecting fish. After she’d hung up from talking to Emily, Sis threw back her sheet, slipped into sweat shorts, black T-shirt and gardening gloves, then tiptoed down the stairs.
Her sister had been wrong about Jim. He just wasn’t ready for public appearances, especially at the café where everybody knew him and would expect to hear a blow-by-blow account of his experiences in Vietnam. Sis decided to stick to the one thing she could control, fixing up the garden, bedraggled from a brutal summer of heat and bugs. The wedding was only weeks away.
Still, Sis didn’t mind the extra work. This was the part of the day she loved best, early morning when the dew was still on and she had the gardens to herself. Nature expected nothing of her. If she showed up to pull a few weeds and drench the beds with the water during dry spells, she was rewarded with prize-winning blossoms and tomatoes so big you could slice one and have plenty for five bacon and tomatoes sandwiches. If she didn’t show up, the resulting weeds became homes for the geckos and frogs Andy liked to catch and carry to the little frog houses he built all over the backyard with sticks and dirt.
It always amazed Sis that he expected the frog to be grateful, to set up housekeeping and be waiting when Andy stopped by later to ask how to catch flies with your tongue. Failing to get advice from a frog, he always turned to Sis.
Even if she didn’t have children of her own, Andy was the next best thing.
She eased the back door shut. Sweet Mama and Beulah were still asleep on the first floor, Sweet Mama in a big bedroom filled with mahogany furniture hauled from New Orleans in a wagon, and Beulah in a sunny room that had once belonged to Sis’s mother and daddy.
There had been no sounds coming from Jim’s room, either. Whether he was sleeping or lying on top of his covers with his eyes wide-open, Sis couldn’t say. All she could do was remember how he’d taken his duffel bag straight to his old room on the second floor last night, then shut the door.
Carrying the prosthetic leg he’d left in the umbrella stand downstairs, Sis had gone right in behind him.
“Don’t you ever knock?”
“You might as well not try your stinger on me, Jim Blake. I can still whip your butt.” She laid the prosthetic leg on the end of his bed. “I’m not going to let you shut yourself up here and have a pity party.”
“This is not pity, it’s a fact. If you want somebody to wear that leg, wear it yourself.”
“All right. Forget the leg for now. But don’t think I’m done. We lost Daddy and Mark to war, and I’m not going to lose you, too.”
“We lost Daddy in a car wreck.”
As if she didn’t know. Sis had turned and walked out of the room, the sound of crunching metal and the screams of her parents echoing through her mind. She’d been in that car, a teenager happy she didn’t have to stay home with the twins and Sweet Mama while her mother picked up Major Bill Blake at the bus station and brought him home for the holidays.
The driver who hit them was so drunk he didn’t see the red light, didn’t notice the car or the three people inside who were singing “White Christmas.” He never knew the look of surprise on Bill Blake’s face or the way Margaret Blake reached for her husband’s hand or the thoughts that tumbled through the head of a teenage girl flung clear of the wreckage. Sitting on the side of Highway 90 with her head hurting, Sis had checked her new red sweater set for damage.
What she should have been doing was checking her parents for a pulse, checking her future to see how she’d ever live with the guilt that she’d survived and they hadn’t.
Remembering, Sis jerked weeds out of the flower beds so hard she rocked back on her heels. She was not going to get mired down in the past and she most certainly wasn’t going to let her brother be one of those vets who returned from war but never really came home. The military had taken too much from her, and she was determined it would not take another single thing.
The back screen door popped, and Sweet Mama called, “Sis, can you help me with this?”
Her gardening gloves were on, her bonnet was askew and she was wrestling with a huge basket full of flowers. Plastic, for God’s sake. Sweet Mama wouldn’t be caught dead with a plastic flower in her house.
If Sis were Emily, she’d send up a petition to God, but she’d discovered if you wanted something, you’d best do it yourself.
“What in the world are you doing with plastic roses?”
“Shh, not so loud, Sis. I don’t want to wake that heifer.”
That heifer was Stella Mae Clifford. Sweet Mama marched to the edge of the yard and peered through the rose hedge toward the two-story Victorian house next door, a twin of theirs except it was painted yellow instead of pink.
Satisfied that her archenemy wasn’t about, she came back across the yard, chuckling, then plucked a pink plastic rose from the basket and secured it to the hedge with green gardening tape.
“Imagine that silly cow’s surprise when she wakes up and sees these on my rosebushes.”
Emily would die when she saw them. Still, Sis started taping plastic roses onto the nearly naked bushes.
“She’ll never believe you still have roses, Sweet Mama.”
“Yes, she will. She can’t half see.”
Black spot blight and aphids, enjoying the long stretch of intense heat and dry weather, had stripped every rosebush in Biloxi, including the hedge Sweet Mama was now decorating with plastic blossoms.
“Hurry up, Sis, before it gets daylight. We’ve got to get down to the café so I can put the coffee on for the regulars.”
“Emily can do that. Why don’t you and Beulah stay here and enjoy Jim’s first morning home? I think he could use the company.”
“Beulah’s in there now petting him like he’s three years old. Jim’s going to be all right. He’s like me. Made of strong stuff.” Sweet Mama plucked the last rose out of the basket and taped it to the disease-ravaged hedge. “Thank God he didn’t take after that jackass I married.”
There was a picture of their granddaddy on the walls at Sweet Mama’s, captioned simply The Jackass. Everybody knew it was Peter Blake, and everybody knew the story.
Sweet Mama had the misfortune to marry a man who was already married—to the bottle. Hardly an evening passed that he didn’t come home full of alcohol and bad attitude and smelling of another woman’s perfume.
After she had two boys, she made up her mind they’d not have Peter Blake as an example. One full moon when he came home sloshed and fell dead asleep into his bed, Sweet Mama went into the garden and pulled up two stout, dry cornstalks. Then she proceeded to tie her husband to the bed with the sheets and beat the devil out of him. When she’d whipped him sober, she packed his bags, threw them out the door and told him she didn’t want to ever see his sorry skinny self again.
Through the years he’d been spotted everywhere from Maine to California. The last they heard, he was up in Anchorage, Alaska. Wherever he was, that day he hightailed it was the last of Peter Blake in Biloxi and the beginning of Sweet Mama’s transformation from wife and mother to independent businesswoman, an unusual thing for a woman in 1921.
Some said Stella Mae Clifford was Peter Blake’s mistress, that he was the one who’d built her house next door. Once, Sis had asked Sweet Mama if the rumor was true.
“I like to keep people guessing, Sis. A juicy rumor is good for business. Better than a full-page ad in the newspaper.”
With the last plastic rose in place, Sweet Mama settled her bonnet on her head and shot a bird to the house next door.
“Take that, you silly old cow.”
What if Sweet Mama’s escapade with the plastic roses was not a sign of senility but a sign that the sassy, unsinkable Lucy Long Blake of years gone by was still shining through? What if she were made of such strong stuff she could defeat all the alarming signs of a mind and a body roaring toward old age?
“Let’s go inside so you can eat, Sweet Mama. Then I’ll drive you to the café. We’ve got a wedding to plan.”
“I don’t want to ride with you.”
“Why not?”
“You drive like a bat out of hell.”
It was true. Was it because Sis was in love with speed or was she thumbing her nose at fate, saying I cheated you once, see if you can catch me now?
“All right. We’ll go in separate cars. But you be careful, you hear?”
“Pshaw” was all Sweet Mama said.
Sis took her arm and led her up the back steps that might be a grandmother trap. Beulah was in the kitchen waiting for them.
“It’s about time ya’ll come in from the garden,” she said. “Breakfast is getting cold.”
“You and Sweet Mama go ahead and eat. I’ve got a few more things to do in the garden.”
“Not without something in your stomach, you don’t.” Beulah slapped two pieces of bacon between a biscuit and handed them to Sis as she headed back to the garden.
Sis decided to leave the plastic roses for a while. By tomorrow, Sweet Mama would have forgotten all about them, and Sis could remove them without causing a fuss. The rose hedge itself was another matter. She could fertilize and water a few of the bushes and hope for a little bit of greenery in time for the wedding, but most of them had to be dug up. She’d plant new ones tomorrow.
She went into the double garage where Jim’s baby-blue Thunderbird was parked, and the fishing boat Sis hadn’t used all summer. Thinking that fishing might be just the thing for her brother, she found her spade, then went back to the rose hedge and started to dig.
In spite of spindly growth with only a few blighted leaves, the rosebush had roots that seemed to go all the way to China. Sweat darkened her shirt and poured down her face as the mound of earth piled up.
Suddenly, her spade struck something hard. It was probably part of a brick or an old Mason jar. These old houses had yards full of junk tossed out and buried under years of accumulated dirt. Dropping to her knees, Sis leaned close to investigate, using her hands to carefully rake away the earth.
The bleached bones came suddenly into view, and Sis felt her breath leave her body. She bent closer to inspect her find. The bones didn’t look like much at first, maybe the carcass of a dead squirrel. Or something larger. A dog, perhaps. A family pet.
That was the answer, of course. On a day when the sky looked as if angels had polished it with lemon wax, what could possibly be awry in Sweet Mama’s garden?
Sis continued to dig, but as the mound of dirt collected at her feet and her discovery under the rosebushes revealed its true nature, she sank back on her heels, her heart hammering so loud it was a wonder they didn’t hear it clear in the kitchen. That was no family pet under the roses. It was a skeletal foot, pointing straight toward disaster. She felt as if everything tethering her to earth had been cut away and she was tumbling headlong into that dark hole with the bleached bones. Questions spun through her mind with the dizzying speed of a comet. Who? Why? And how?
But the one that burned a hole through her was What do these bones have to do with my family?
The sun had already climbed into a hot blue sky and beat unmercifully on her and her eerie find, the toe bones attached to the foot, the foot attached to the ankle. And what else? If she kept digging would she find the entire body?
She poked gingerly with her spade, each thrust meeting a sickening resistance that told its own story. The weight of sudden fear dropped her to her knees, but no matter how hard she stared at the awful thing in the hole, no matter how hard she wished she’d never taken her shovel to the roses, the bones wouldn’t go away. Bleached whiter than the wings of angels, they grew so big in Sis’s mind they took up all her oxygen, deprived her of breath and speech and hope. They grew so big she felt as if they were splitting the earth beneath her feet. Any minute now it would open up and swallow her whole, and along with her, everything she loved.
Slowly, Sis pushed herself upright. The woman who had come blithely into the garden expecting to tidy up for her sister’s wedding had suddenly become a woman whose awful discovery could destroy her family. Nothing would ever be the same. From this day on she would divide her life into two parts: before she found the bones and after.
The proper thing would be to tell the authorities, but then they’d have yellow crime scene tape all over the backyard during the wedding, reporters hounding their steps, gossips leaning on every fence post in Biloxi, speculating on the gruesome discovery in the Blake’s backyard. The scandal would be worse than when Emily got pregnant in high school and then was ditched by a boy who’d rather risk getting shot than marry her.
Frantic, Sis spaded the dirt back into the hole, telling herself after the wedding was soon enough to report this. Besides, she’d more than likely uncovered a relic, one of those Civil War casualties whose body had never been found.
She tamped the dirt carefully back into place, and then with one last glance to make sure the bones didn’t show, she stowed her spade, pulled off her gloves and went into the house.
“Lord God,” Beulah said. “You’re pale as a bar of Ivory soap. If you ain’t careful you’re gonna work you’self into a heatstroke.”
Beulah handed her a glass of water, but the lump of despair in her throat was so big Sis couldn’t swallow a single drop.
“Beaulah, do you know what’s buried under the roses?”
Setting her mouth in a straight line, Beulah turned her back on Sis and began washing dishes.
“More than likely a stray cat. I hope you covered it back up. Ain’t no sense ruining Emily’s wedding.”
“It’s not a cat. It’s a body.”
Beulah headed toward the table, a freight train gaining steam.
“You hear me good now, chile. Let it alone.”
Sis nodded or maybe she said yes through a throat so parched words got caught and couldn’t find their way out. A whole set of possibilities swirled through her mind, all of them tragic. If she could ever break free of Biloxi, she was going somewhere so frozen it wouldn’t grow a single rosebush. She’d find a place with snow so deep she’d need an Alaskan husky to find buried bones.
“I want you to go on down to the café and forget about them rosesbushes. You hear me now, Sis?”
“Loud and clear.”
“No use upsetting Emily and Jim, either. Just tell her to hold off on them German chocolate cakes. I aim to stay home and show Jim what he’s got instead of what he’s lost.”
Sis understood the things Beulah left unsaid, her comprehension so perfect she wondered if she’d ever had a normal life in the little pink Victorian house by the sea or if she’d only imagined it.
Beulah leaned down and folded her into a voluminous hug.
“Don’t you worry none. Everything’s gonna be all right, sugar pie.”
For a moment the thought of bones vanished, and Sis allowed herself to sink so deep into Beulah’s endearment she became a little girl again with her whole life in front of her, a shining path she could follow to the stars.
Three (#ulink_152c50e7-3b96-5e70-8abb-23d8a44de710)
WHEN SIS LEFT THE KITCHEN she could hear Sweet Mama down the hall, singing some rollicking old song from the Jazz Age. Did she know about the bones in the garden? The last thing Sis wanted to do was ask her and completely undo a mind already coming unraveled. Instead, she hurried up the stairs and tapped on Jim’s door.
“Come in.” He was standing on his crutch at the window with his back to the door, his shoulders hunched in a too-big pajama top and his sleep-ruffled hair sticking up like Andy’s.
The brother she’d sent to Vietnam was one she’d have confided in about the skeleton in the garden. This brother she wanted to fold into her arms and croon to the way she had when he was a child crying over a skinned knee.
“Jim, I’ll be heading to the café soon. Would you like to come with me?”
“Not today, Sis.”
He didn’t even turn around, just kept staring out the window as if he couldn’t believe the blue Gulf spread out before him, the white sand dotted with umbrellas and tourists, the seagulls wheeling through a sky the color of a robin’s egg. Sis didn’t even want to think what hell he’d seen over there, a vague euphemism she’d hated until she discovered there’s only so much horror a person can stand in one day.
“That’s okay, Jim. Take your time. Beulah’s going to be here today, cooking up all your favorites.” That turned her brother from the window, brought the ghost of a smile. “And I imagine Em’s make you something special at the café.”
“Tell Em not to worry about me.”
“I will.” Not that it would change a thing. Emily had always shared everything with Jim, the heartache, the joy, even the measles. Sis watched her brother standing there, sagging, a posture so foreign to him she wanted to cry. “It’s a beautiful day, Jim. Why don’t you get out your convertible and take Beulah for a spin?”
“Some other time, maybe.”
What would he do all day? Hole up in the room staring out the window? Sis stood in the doorway torn between the urge to stay and take care of her brother and the need to go to the café to help Emily and Sweet Mama take care of business. In the end, her practical side won. If the café failed, they’d all go under.
She hurried to her room to dress, and then got into her Valiant and followed along behind Sweet Mama in her ancient, oversize Buick. Thank God her grandmother wrecked nothing but a hydrangea bush backing out of the driveway. And miracle of miracles, she stayed on her side of the road all the way to the café.
Still, by the time Sis got there, she was a nervous wreck. She made herself stand still in the center of the room, just breathing, grounding herself in the familiar smells of bacon and coffee and sugar and sweet, ripe peaches. Emily had already baked six Amen cobblers that were cooling on the countertop, and Sweet Mama was standing safe and sound at the coffee urns making a special pot for her customers who always asked for chicory—Burt Larson, the mailman, Tom and James Wilson, the brothers who had a barbershop next door and Miss Opal Clemson, the music teacher who claimed she’d once played the piano for a concert by Leontyne Price, Mississippi’s famed opera singer.
It seemed so much like an ordinary day that Sis could almost forget her grisly find in the garden. But the Amen cobblers were sending up thick steam you could get lost in and never find your way out of, a sure sign of a disaster so huge even Sis wouldn’t be able to contain it. The bones in the garden were just the beginning.
She pulled herself together and found her sister in the kitchen wearing a pink shirt with long sleeves, for Pete’s sake, and it was already hot enough to fry an egg in the parking lot. Still, the sight of Emily covered with a dusting of flour and elbow deep in German chocolate cakes gave Sis a momentary respite from thinking about portentous cobblers and backyard bones.
“Hey, Sis!” Emily said, smiling as she poured batter into cake pans. “Where’s Jim?”
“He’s not up to socializing yet, Em.”
“I should have known that.” Emily scraped batter off the bottom of the bowl and held out a wooden stirring spoon. “Do you want to lick the spoon?”
She took up a spot by her sister and opened her mouth for the taste of raw batter, rich with sugar and butter. It brought back memories of childhood, with Jim and Emily perched on stools at Sweet Mama’s side and Sis standing at her elbow, listening to stories of the café in its infancy, waiting their turns to lick the batter from the latest confection in progress—a German chocolate cake, a lemon icebox pie, a Coca-Cola cake or Emily’s favorite, Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.
“Beulah said for you to wait on these cakes,” Sis said.
“If I had waited, there wouldn’t be any spoons to lick.” Emily bumped Sis’s hip, teasing her, and then crammed the huge stirring spoon into her mouth. It left a smear of cake batter on her cheek that made her look like a little girl.
“How do you know, Em? Someday I might make a cake.”
Emily whooped. “I want a picture of that. It would be one for the walls.”
Sis stuck her finger in the bowl and dabbed batter on her sister’s nose. Emily paid her back with a smear on the chin, and soon they were doubled over with laughter.
“Oh, my goodness.” Emily put the bowl and spoons into the sink. “If I don’t get this mess cleaned up, I’ll never be ready to open.”
“I’ll rinse.” Sis wiped cake batter off her face and moved to the sink. “You load the dishwasher.”
“Good,” Emily said. “That gives us time to talk about the wedding. I was thinking of putting flower baskets in the garden instead of depending on the roses.”
Pricked with sudden alarm, Sis just stood there with the water running unheeded over the dishes.
“I don’t think you ought to have it in the garden.”
“Since when? Just this morning you said it would be fine.”
“I checked it after we talked. It looks awful out there.”
“I know it’s not at its best this time of year, Sis, but I’ve always wanted a garden wedding.”
Sis had an awful vision of Emily standing atop the bones saying I do.
“It’s too hot, Em. Everybody will parch.”
“We can put the chairs under the shade.”
“I have a better idea. Wait till November when things have cooled off.”
Could she report the bones and get the mess cleared out of her garden by November?
“I will not have Andy start school without two parents. Okay?”
Was Emily remembering walking the halls of Biloxi High to whispers of easy and slut, her baby bump showing and Mark Jones already enlisted and gone? Was she thinking about how she’d had to sit on the sidelines while the rest of her classmates walked onstage to get their diplomas?
“Nobody’s going to call him names, Em. Not while I draw breath.”
“What are you going to do, Sis? Go to school with him every day?”
“I’m not above it.”
“You’re not going to get me to change my mind, and you might as well quit trying. I will not have my son called bastard.”
“All right. I understand. But at least think about getting married in Sweet Mama’s living room. We could buy some of those pink roses you love so much and put them in wicker baskets on either side of the mantel.”
“Forget it, Sis.”
“You could walk down the staircase and not have to trail your wedding dress in the dirt.”
“Good grief! Just let it alone. It’s my wedding and I’m getting married in the garden.”
Sis imagined Uncle Steve’s nosy wife, Ethel, poking around the pitiful rosebushes and finding the bony foot sticking out of the ground, imagined cops and pandemonium and scandal.
“But, Em, think what a hissy fit Aunt Ethel will pitch if she gets too hot out there. Or what if it starts to rain?”
“I’ve had my say, Sis, and that’s my final word.”
Emily huffed over to the stove and turned her back.
Sis wished she could start the day over. She’d sleep late and never see Sweet Mama tying plastic roses on the bush, never drive along behind her at twenty miles an hour in case she ran over another hydrangea bush. But most of all, she’d never dig up a rosebush and find bones.
Sis turned to the window and saw her nephew in the backyard, surrounded by boxes.
“Is Andy building a fort out there?”
“No. A rocket ship. He’s planning to fly me to the moon.”
“Maybe he’ll take me, too.” She looked back at her baby sister standing there oblivious in her long-sleeved shirt, expecting every downpour to yield a rainbow. “I’m sorry, Em. I’m such a grump.”
“You’re not totally grumpy. Just a little.”
“I’m going outside to cool off and visit with Andy, and when I come back inside, we’ll plan a wedding that will turn your enemies green with envy.”
“I don’t have enemies,” Emily said without a single hint of irony.
Lord, Sis hoped that was true. She raced through the door, the scent of Amen cobbler following her all the way, so strong it felt like somebody squeezing her heart. Outside, she leaned against the wall, trying to catch a deep breath. What would become of her family if she worried herself into a heart attack? It could happen. Last year a woman not three years older than Sis had keeled over on the front pew of the Biloxi Baptist Church, and her with three children to look after and a husband, besides.
“Hey, Aunt Sis,” Andy called. “How many batteries you got?”
He was standing on top of a TV box in his Superman suit, his blond cowlick sticking up in front like the crest of a baby bird, his sturdy legs beneath the too-short pants turned dark gold from a summer in the sun, the big red S on his shirt faded from too many washings. His feet were bare and his face was filled with excitement.
“I don’t have any batteries in my pockets, but I’ll bet I can find some. What are they for?”
“My rocket ship. It’s gonna take lots to get to the moon.”
Hope is such a fragile thing, a butterfly wing you could crush with one finger. Walking a thin line, terrified of leaning too far to the left or the right, Sis squatted beside her nephew at the pile of boxes.
“Let me help you with that rocket ship.”
“Me and you’s gonna build the bestest one!” Andy scrambled among the pile and came up with a box still smelling of laundry detergent. “Mommy won’t let me use a knife. Can you cut the window, Aunt Sis?”
“I can.”
As she pulled out a pocketknife and cut a window right over the T on the Tide box, Sis missed the family she might have had as if they were real, as if she had a husband who kept her picture on his desk, a daughter named Susan who had inherited her aunt Emily’s beautiful blond hair and a sturdy son named Bill after her own father, a son who loved baseball and digging for worms and sitting on the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River with a fishing pole.
When Andy raced inside to peer out through the hole, her phantom family vanished, leaving her in the backyard of the café with a nephew whose grin lit a candle in her heart.
“Oh, boy. When I fly to the moon, I can see my daddy up there in the stars.”
If Sis were in her sister’s shoes, she’d never have painted Mark Jones as a hero. In her book, there was nothing heroic about leaving a pregnant girlfriend to face the fallout in a Bible Belt society. But what did she know about love and children? She’d never had either.
“Do you think I’ll see my daddy, Aunt Sis?”
“Maybe.”
Andy got that little boy skeptical look that said I know you’re going to break my heart with the truth but I love you enough to stand here and smile while you do it.
“If you look with your heart, and maybe wear a special pair of glasses.”
“What kinda glasses?”
“The kind I’ve got back home in my dresser drawer.” It was an old pair of sunglasses, red with white polka dots and cat-eye frames. “Every astronaut ought to have a pair. I’ll give them to you.”
Andy clambered out of the box, then raced to the base of a live oak and dug a while in the dirt. When he came back, he handed Sis a white rock the size of a hen egg, along with a good-size chunk of soil.
“You the bestest, Aunt Sis. This is for you.”
“Thank you, Andy.”
“It’s a magic rock.”
“What does it do?”
“Wish real hard and rub it. See? Like this.” He put his grubby little hand on the rock and rubbed with all his might. “Then your wish’ll come true.”
Sis kissed the top of his head, which smelled like sunshine and salty sea air and optimism.
“I’ve got to get back inside, but you keep up the good work, Andy.”
Grinning, he made a fist and bumped it against hers.
“Later, ’gator,” he said.
“After a while, crocodile.”
Before she got to the back door, she rubbed the rock in her pocket. Just in case it might still contain a little boy’s belief in magic.
* * *
That afternoon Sis left the café early, and if you looked close enough you’d see a cloud of anxiety over her head as dark as a flock of blackbirds. You’d see a woman who has lost her moral compass, one who stopped seeing in black-and-white the minute she dug under the rosebushes.
Driving by the seawall as familiar as the peaches in Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler, Sis glanced at the beach, hoping for distraction, longing to see a little boy in a baseball cap hitting a fly ball into a blue surf pounding the white sand. But all she saw were shades of gray. No color. No right. No wrong. Just a vast shadowy land where the truth was hidden under a rosebush and anything at all was possible.
Finally, the Victorian house came into view, but it no longer put Sis in mind of a tall glass of sweet tea on the front porch swing. She parked and hurried straight to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Beulah or Jim.
Perhaps it was movement in the backyard that caught her eye, or it could have been instinct, sharpened by years of trouble and perfected to art by constant vigilance.
Beulah wore a red hat with a brim wide enough to shade two people, and in her hand was a shovel.
Sis barreled through the back door and took the steps two at a time.
“Beulah! What on earth are you doing?”
“What does it look like, Sis? I’m planting roses.”
There they were, new rosebushes all in a row, standing like sentinels over the bones. Even the bush that had sheltered the foot had vanished, and in its place was a Don Juan climber, its petals dripping to the ground red as blood. Closer inspection revealed that these end-of-summer bushes were hardly better than the disease-ravaged ones they’d replaced. Instead of rich, green branches full of life, the new bushes were mere skeletons, their limbs holding a puny offering of sparse leaves and small blossoms.
“Good Lord. Where did you find these?”
“Closeout sale at the corner market.”
“They won’t live in this heat.”
“Yes, they will. I aim to water ’em every day.” Beulah stripped off her gloves and handed Sis the shovel, as matter-of-factly as if she’d just planted prizewinning roses in a spring garden. “Stow this, will you, Sis? I’m gonna get some sweet tea before I melt.”
Sis held on to the shovel and stared at the Don Juan, paralyzed. Were the bones still under there? Or had Beulah moved them?
Sis had an insane urge to ram the sharp edge of the shovel under the bush and see for herself, but it was broad daylight and there was no telling who might be looking out a window or passing along the street. What would they see? Would they see a decisive woman who never even blinked when she chose family over college, who ate the same thing every morning without once wondering if corn flakes would be better for her than biscuits and bacon, who got out of bed every day at the same time and did her job in precisely the same way without ever stopping to cry over what she might be missing? Or would they see a divided woman split by the need to protect her family at all costs and the urge to discover the truth behind the awful secret in her garden?
It seemed to Sis that the bones under her feet were calling out to her, trying to tell her of something she’d missed, some little clue from her past that might reveal why they were there.
She thought back over the years. Once there had been a mimosa tree where the rose hedge stood. Its twin was still on the other side of the yard, its branches sturdy enough to hold a tree swing for Andy. She tried to remember when the first mimosa tree had come down, but the red petals drifting over her shoes from the newly planted Don Juan brought her mind back from the past and into the awful present.
The back door popped open and Beulah called, “Everything all right out here, Sis?”
“Everything’s fine.”
As she hurried off to the garage to stow the shovel, she tasted the bitterness of her lie. Everything she’d held true about herself and her history was suddenly in question.
She heard the sound of Sweet Mama’s powerful old Buick engine, followed by the slamming of a car door and Emily’s voice. “Andy, be careful and don’t drop the pie.”
She’d followed Sweet Mama to make sure she got home all right, just as she’d promised Sis she would. The pie would be the coconut cream she’d made at the café especially for Jim. Soon Emily would be driving to her own house where she would stand in her little blue-and-white kitchen making cookies for Andy and dreaming of having a family complete with a husband.
Sis tried not to even think about that, about dreams that turned out wrong and dreams that got left in the dust.
“Watch your step, Sweet Mama!” Emily’s voice echoed through the stillness of a clear afternoon. She’d be taking Sweet Mama’s elbow now as they climbed the front porch steps, something neither sister would have imagined the need for five years earlier.
The front screen door popped, and Beulah called out, “Ya’ll set that pie in the kitchen, then come back here on the porch under the ceiling fan. I got sweet tea made.”
Their voices receded and Sis stood in the doorway of the garage, half in shadow, half in sun, which seemed to her a metaphor for her life. Soon she would join her family, smiling while she sipped iced tea and discussed her sister’s wedding. Looking at her, nobody would know she was the keeper of a nightmare, one so dark that if she made a false move her world would crumble. And with it the family she loved.
Four (#ulink_35e91cf9-c3bd-5336-b2d7-498eb39611a4)
SWEET MAMA’S KITCHEN SMELLED of fried chicken and field peas cooked with fatback, sweet corn seasoned with butter and sweet potato casserole cooked with chunks of pineapple, each scent as distinctive to Emily as if she’d personally stood at Beulah’s elbow watching her cook for Jim. While Andy began a reconnaissance of the area that included looking in every cabinet and peering out the window, Emily set the coconut cream pie on the table beside a platter piled high with Beulah’s biscuits.
The kitchen was Emily’s favorite room in Sweet Mama’s house, or any house, for that matter. Her best memories were here. She ran her hands over the scarred surface of the table. She’d sat at that same table while Sis struggled to explain the mystery of numbers and her twin brother breezed through the multiplication table as if he’d been born knowing it. She pictured her own little maple table and how Larry would soon bend patiently over Andy, helping him add and subtract and listening to him as he read about Dick and Jane from the first grade reader. Did they still teach Dick and Jane? She could hardly wait to find out.
“Mommy!” Andy tugged at her skirt. “Sis is out in the backyard! Can I go out and make frog houses with her?”
“That’s a wonderful idea. But first go out to the front porch and tell Beulah and Sweet Mama I’m going upstairs to see Uncle Jim.”
“’K!” He raced off, his sneakers skidding in the polished hallway.
“Andy,” she called. “Don’t run in the house.”
“I won’t.”
Emily grinned. Of course he would. What little boy ever walked when it was so much more fun to run?
She got a dessert plate from the cabinet and cut a generous slice of pie, then headed upstairs to find her brother. Beulah said he hadn’t come out of his room all day. When Emily got upstairs and pushed open his door, she saw evidence of his hermitlike day—his bed still unmade, the plate of half-eaten chicken and the glass with ice melting in leftover tea. Jim was sitting in a straight chair at his desk, an open book in front of him, his beard stubble so blond it was barely visible.
“Em!” His smile reminded her of Andy’s, except for the vacant eyes.
“What are you reading?”
She walked over and put her arm around his shoulder, and he gestured toward the page, Constellations and Constitution in Volume C of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He could have been reading about either one with equal curiosity.
“I hope Andy inherited your brain,” she said.
“I hope he’s nothing like me.” The force of his passion catapulted him from his chair, while Emily stood by, helpless. “Look at me, Em! I can’t even stand the sight of my own face.”
“It’s a dear face. I love your face.” She cupped her brother’s cheeks. “Look at me, Jim.”
“Don’t, Em.” He jerked away. “Everywhere I turn I see the eyes of the dead staring back at me. Even when I look at my own sisters.”
He grabbed his crutch and clomped to the window while she stood in the middle of the room wondering what to do. When Andy was hurting she could pull him onto her lap and smooth his hair and sing-song his favorite nursery rhyme. Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King’s horses and the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Who would put her brother back together?
She joined him at the window and linked her arm through his, then just stood there, not saying a word, scarcely daring to breathe in case he pulled away. She tried to think of something wise to say, but in the end nothing came to her. In the end she said a silent prayer, not even knowing whether God would listen to something as simple as Help my brother. Help me help my brother.
A breeze came through the open window, welcome after a day of intense heat, and voices drifted through—the indecipherable, meandering conversation of Sweet Mama and Beulah on the front porch and the clear, high voice of Andy in the backyard, peppering Sis with questions.
“Do holes have bottoms?”
“Can I dig to China?”
“Do frogs get married?”
“Is first grade scary?”
“Can I come home if I don’t like it?”
The sun was lowering toward the western horizon, reminding Emily she’d promised to cook dinner for Larry. An anxiousness rose inside her, the kind of wishy-washy feeling she hated. How could she leave her brother and yet how could she disappoint her fiancé? A mosquito buzzed through the window, and she balanced on one foot to scratch the back of her leg. She got red welts every time one bit her.
“Jim?” He turned toward her with a look of surprise, as if he were just returning from a faraway country and couldn’t believe she was there waiting for him. “If I invite Larry over for dinner here, will you come down and eat with us?”
“I’m not good company.”
“You don’t have to be good company. In fact, you don’t even have to make conversation. I’d just like for you to spend some time with the man who is going to be your brother-in-law.”
His long silence was bound to be no. She scratched her mosquito bite again, waiting.
When her brother finally shrugged and said, “Okay,” Emily felt as if she’d successfully led an expedition to the North Pole.
She left him heading toward the bathroom to shave, and went downstairs to call Larry. When she got to the telephone in the kitchen, she lost some of her resolve. Should she discuss the revised dinner plans with Beulah and Sis first? But what if Larry said no, and then she’d have to tell them he wasn’t coming?
“Emily?” Sis was suddenly standing in the doorway, holding the hand of a dirty little urchin after an enthusiastic excavation of the backyard.
“Good Lord, Sis, you startled me.”
“What’s up, Em? You look like a scared rabbit.”
“Mommy, what’s a scared rabbit?”
“Go wash your hands and face, Andy,” she told her son. “I’ll explain later.”
As he marched off, she told Sis about her plans to invite Larry over for dinner and how it might turn out to be a wonderful ploy to get their brother out of his bedroom.
“That’s great, Em!”
“I thought I could find something in the pantry to fix.”
“Good Lord, Emily. Beulah always cooks enough to feed an invasion of Martians. And don’t you worry about Sweet Mama.”
“Are the Martians coming?” Andy was back, standing in the doorway bouncing up on his toes in his excitement.
“No, the Martians are not coming.” Emily studied the level of dirt still on her son. “You forgot to wash behind your ears. I could build a frog house with that leftover dirt.”
“’K.”
As her son raced off once more and her sister puttered around the kitchen—washing her hands, pouring herself a glass of iced tea—Emily felt herself settle down. Apart from her family and Sweet Mama’s café, she sometimes felt a bit out of her element, as if she’d taken a wrong turn on the road and ended up in an unfamiliar place.
“Okay, then.” She smiled as Sis settled into a kitchen chair with her tea. “That settles everything.”
“It’s a good idea, Em. Larry needs to learn more about the family he’s marrying into.”
The way her sister’s eyes gleamed, it seemed to Emily the shoe was on the other foot: Sis was the one who wanted to find out about the man Emily would soon be calling her own. Still, as she picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Larry’s work number, she even felt a small sense of accomplishment.
When she said, “Hello, Larry,” and he called her darling, she saw her future unfold as a series of Hallmark cards, each scene a perfect depiction of a happy family.
Words spilled out of her so fast, she got tangled up and had to start over. By the time she’d finished telling him about the change of plans, she was flushed as if she’d been running.
There was a deep silence at the other end of the line.
“Larry? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, thank goodness. For a minute, I thought we’d been cut off.”
“No, I was thinking...how could you just change plans without even discussing it with me?”
“Well, of course I should have. I know that.” She bit her lip, feeling somehow inadequate and wondering what she’d done that was so wrong. “Still, my brother is just home from the war, and he’s feeling so alone right now, I thought it would be nice if you could come over and cheer him up.”
Why didn’t Larry say something?
“You know, a little man-to-man talk in a house full of women?” She waited, nervous, and still Larry said nothing. “Of course, there’s Andy, but I’m afraid his conversation runs to frog houses and rocket ships.”
Emily twisted the phone cord around her fingers, and a little pulse started pounding in her temple.
“Larry? Are you still there?” She put a hand to her forehead and silently counted to three. “Say something. Please.”
Sis set down her glass in that slow, deliberate manner she had when she was getting ready to wade into the middle of a situation gone bad. Even worse, she pushed back her chair. Emily frantically signaled her sister to sit back down.
When Larry finally decided to talk to her again, she was so flustered she nearly dropped the receiver.
“You said you’d make spaghetti and meatballs, Emily.” He was breathing hard, like somebody having a heart attack.
“Larry? Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. Just disappointed, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, Larry.” She looked down at her engagement ring and twisted it on her finger. “I was just... I don’t know what I was doing.” She squinted at her ring. “I was just trying to be helpful, that’s all.”
Sis was scowling so hard it seemed to Emily the whole room had gone dark.
“I was looking forward to your spaghetti, Emily,” Larry told her.
“I promise you I’ll make spaghetti and meatballs the next time. And listen, Beulah is one of the best cooks on the Gulf Coast. I know you’re going to enjoy having dinner with my family.”
“I even told my boss I was eating spaghetti my fiancée made.”
“I’m sorry, Larry. I really, really am.”
She couldn’t even look at Sis. She knew what she’d see: a sister getting ready to explode.
Emily frantically searched for a way to salvage the situation. It was too late to fix spaghetti from scratch and still have dinner at her house at a decent hour. But she could pick up some spaghetti sauce on her way home and doctor it up so Larry wouldn’t be able to tell it from the real thing.
“Listen, Larry. Just forget I even mentioned dinner at Sweet Mama’s. I’ll hurry on home to cook and see you in a little while. Okay?”
His sigh was as dramatic as Andy’s when he’d been told he had to take a bath before going to bed.
“I forgive you, sweetheart. And I’ll come to Sweet Mama’s for dinner. But next time, discuss plans with me first, okay?”
“Of course. I will.”
Sis was out of her chair before Emily had even hung up the phone.
“That rat! What did he say to you?”
“He was disappointed about the spaghetti, Sis, that’s all.”
“Disappointed, my hind foot. It looks like he put you through the wringer.” Sis stomped over to the sink and dumped the rest of her iced tea so hard ice cubes bounced over the lip of the sink and rattled to the floor. “I’d like to slap some sense into him. And if he gives me half a chance, I will.”
“We have to all get along.”
“If he wants to get along with me, he’d better start treating my sister right.”
“He treats me just fine. Really, he does.”
“Do you call that fine, being reduced to a nervous wreck just because you invited him to dinner?” Sis snatched up a dish towel and attacked the ice cubes on the floor. “Apologizing for Pete’s sake, as if you’d done something wrong!”
“Please, Sis! He’s going to be my husband!”
Sis went very still, collecting her rage the way the air collects turbulence right before a tornado rips through. If you didn’t know Sis, you’d tremble in your shoes; you’d expect her to tear into you any minute and try to straighten you out. But Emily saw with a sister’s heart. She watched Sis rein in her feelings and bury them so deep not a glimmer was left behind.
Sis dumped the ice cubes back into the sink, easy now in her movements and her posture.
“All right. I’ll behave.”
“Oh, Sis! I knew you would.”
“But that doesn’t mean I like it, Em.”
“I know.”
“I don’t like this man and I don’t like the idea of you marrying him. But we’ll get through the evening. Now I’m going to clean up and then warn Sweet Mama and Beulah.”
“Warn?”
“Tell. Is that better?”
“Much.”
“Em, I want you to think about the way Larry acted over something as simple as coming here for dinner. If he’s this controlling now, what will he be like after the wedding?”
“Sis, don’t start on Larry again.”
“I’m not starting on Larry. Just promise me you’ll think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I promise.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
Sis left the kitchen while the conversation with Larry burned through Emily. Not even the endearment he’d used to say goodbye could erase the sense that she’d headed out to pick a basketful of ripe strawberries and ended up in a tangle of briars. She bent over the sink to splash cool water on her hot face, then stood with water dripping down her chin, simply stood there staring into space.
Sis’s footsteps echoed on the wooden floors upstairs. She’d be going about her business, getting cleaned up for dinner. From the direction of the hall closet came sounds of Andy’s rambunctious search, probably for one of Sis’s old balls and her baseball bat. Out on the porch, her grandmother and Beulah would be drinking sweet tea from tall, cool glasses, blissfully unaware of the little storm that had swept through the kitchen.
After a little while, Emily shook herself like a woman coming out of a bad dream, then searched the pantry till she found an apron. She wasn’t going to let this little setback spoil the evening. It was going to be great, maybe even wonderful, that’s all. She wouldn’t have it any other way. Her brother needed wonderful, and right this minute, so did she.
* * *
Upstairs Sis washed the dirt off and changed into fresh slacks and a clean black T-shirt, but there was nothing she could do to erase the awful way Emily had looked during her phone conversation with Larry. He’d crushed her with the ease and carelessness of someone smashing a butterfly.
She thought about knocking on Jim’s door and relating the incident to him, but he might be getting dressed, and besides, he was too hurt from his own wounds to be burdened with Sis’s dark opinions.
She headed back downstairs to warn Sweet Mama and Beulah. They were both in rocking chairs on the porch, swaying gently to the ebb and flow of their conversation. Sis stood in the doorway a moment, the rhythm of their words running through her like a beloved song. No matter what was going on in the world around her, Sis could hear their voices and feel herself being tethered to this place she called home. She allowed herself the luxury of soaking up that comfort a moment longer, and then she pushed away and marched across the wooden porch.
“Guess who’s coming to dinner?” she said.
“If you fixing to tell me you bringing Sidney Poitier, I’m gonna get all gussied up.” Beulah chuckled, and after a heartbreaking lag, Sweet Mama joined her.
They both loved Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. When it had first come out two years ago, they’d planned the theater outing as if they were going on an overnight trip to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
“I hate to disappoint you, Beulah. It’s not Sidney. It’s Larry Chastain.”
“Who?” Sweet Mama said, and Sis leaned down to put a hand on her shoulder.
“Emily’s fiancé. Remember?”
“Of course I do. What do you think I am? Senile?” Sweet Mama eased out of her rocker, one blue-veined hand clutching the armrest to steady herself. “Come on, Beulah. If company’s coming, we’re eating in the dining room and using the good silver.”
“I ain’t sure that man’s worth no good silver, Lucy.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Ain’t you always the judge?” Beulah winked at Sis, then took a hold of Sweet Mama’s arm and led her back into the house. Sis would have followed them, but she knew they’d shoo her out of the way. She was useless around crockery and cutlery. She always ended up breaking or spilling something, and in general making a big mess that had to be cleaned up. She knew her place, and it certainly wasn’t in the kitchen.
She leaned against a porch column and shaded her eyes, looking for signs of her future brother-in-law. She wanted to be the first to see him, to talk to him before Emily came out all flushed, trying to act as if Larry hadn’t already spoiled her evening.
Sis flicked a speck of dust off the front of her shirt, harder than necessary, so hard in fact, that she ended up feeling the sting of her own slap.
His car came upon her suddenly, turning into the driveway before she had decided what she was going to say to him. Let him off the hook completely? Pretend she didn’t know he’d acted an ass about dinner? Emily would be pleased if she kept quiet, but Sis might just choke on her own bile.
“Sis! Don’t you look a vision?” Larry strode up the front steps with the confidence of a smooth-talking, handsome man used to turning heads. Before she knew what was happening, he was bent over her hand, kissing it, and she found herself staring at the too-straight part slicing through his black hair.
“A nightmare is more like it,” she said.
Larry didn’t respond to her self-deprecating comment. Instead, he let go of her hand, thank God, and looked out over the Gulf.
“You have a beautiful view. No wonder Emily loves this place.”
“She does, but then Emily loves almost everything and everybody.”
“Lucky me. I finally found a woman who could look beyond my flaws and see a hero.”
“Emily’s a sweet, trusting woman, Larry. And easily hurt.”
“She’s the woman of every man’s dreams.”
“Yes, she is. I’m glad you know how lucky you are to have her.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it.” Suddenly, Larry puffed up with such self-importance Sis thought he’d levitate right off the front porch. “A salesman learns to read people. When I saw your sister, I read her like a book.”
“And what did that book say?” If he noticed her sarcasm, he didn’t show a sign.
“‘I’m a woman you can keep barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.’”
He laughed at his own Dark Ages attitude, and Sis wanted to slap him off the porch. Emily saved him, rushing out pink-faced and smiling, the only sign of her nervousness showing in the way she wadded a corner of her blue gingham apron into a tight fist.
“Larry! I’m so glad you’re here.” She rushed over to hug him, and he winked over her shoulder at Sis.
Did that jackass dare to think they were coconspirators? Or was he so certain of his hold over her sister that he didn’t care how he flaunted his power?
Still steaming, she watched Larry lead her sister into the house. She had to stand on the porch deep breathing before she could follow. The evening couldn’t be over fast enough to suit Sis.
Five (#ulink_3b57d4e1-03bb-57a0-b7df-3f794f4aace3)
THE DINING ROOM TABLE looked elegant with Sweet Mama’s china and silver gleaming in the candlelight. The candles had been Emily’s idea, a last-minute addition to make Larry feel special. She couldn’t help but take pride that dinner was turning out to be a great success.
Sis was playing hostess with such grace, Emily would never have guessed she’d pitched a hissy fit in the kitchen earlier. Sweet Mama and Beulah wore rhinestone brooches for the occasion, and Andy looked darling with his face scrubbed clean and his flyaway hair slicked back. It looked suspiciously shiny to Emily. Later, she’d have to find out what he used. Usually it was water, but his cowlick was too tame for that.
Even Jim had joined them. Emily was glad, though he hadn’t said a single word except hello.
Fortunately, Larry didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy fielding questions from Sweet Mama and Beulah.
“What brought you down here?” Sweet Mama said, and Larry acted as if she hadn’t already asked him the same question three times. Emily hoped Sis noticed.
“I applied for a transfer to this area because I love fishing.”
“It’s his favorite pastime,” Emily added, hoping Sweet Mama would remember a granddaughter better than she did a virtual stranger.
“Before I met our girl here, I spent all my time with a fishing pole in my hands.”
“Jim has a fishing boat and a convertible.” Emily glanced at her brother, hopeful, but he was moving his mashed potatoes around on his plate. “It would be great if the two of you would let the top down and go fishing together.”
When Jim’s hand tightened over his fork, Emily had the awful feeling that she was pushing her brother back instead of drawing him close. To make matters worse, Beulah scowled at her and Andy started kicking the table leg.
“Fish ain’t biting now or me and Jim would’a gone today.” Beulah closed her hand around Jim’s arm, and there it stayed, dark as sorghum molasses against his white shirt. “Ain’t no telling when they gonna bite again.”
Sis shot Emily a warning glance, but it was already too late to stop a conversation rolling toward disaster.
“Fish always bite for me.” Larry turned his attention to Jim, looking pointedly at the crutch leaning against his chair. “How about it, Jim? Go fishing with me and I’ll do all the driving. Thank God I avoided this senseless war and stayed in one piece.”
“Our boy drives just fine.” Beulah looked like a thundercloud that didn’t care who she rained on.
“Jim’s a hero.” Sweet Mama peered at Larry. “All the men in our family are heroes.”
“How come you didn’t go to war?” Beulah asked.
“I didn’t pass the draft. I was 4F.”
Larry’s face tightened and Emily wadded her napkin into a little ball. Did her future husband have some dire medical condition she didn’t know about?
“Why were you 4F, darling?”
“Flat feet,” he said.
Emily wanted to crawl under the table. Her daddy’s World War II medals were on prominent display in a shadow box in the entry hall and Jim’s Purple Heart would soon be there, as well.
Sweet Mama laid down her fork in that big, clattering way she had when she meant business.
“There’s nothing but patriotic men in this family,” she said, “and we’re proud of it.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Beulah patted Jim’s arm. “In my day, we called them 4F-ers slackers.”
Larry’s face blazed and Emily’s felt hot. She’d explain to Larry later that Sweet Mama was slowly losing touch with reality, that Beulah would say just about anything if she thought one of her babies was under fire, but how would she explain to her family that she was going to marry a man they considered a coward?
And still, there was the rest of this awful evening to get through. She shot a desperate glance at Sis.
“We’re going to take dessert on the front porch,” Sis announced.
“Make sure it’s the good china.” Sweet Mama picked up her fork and smiled at Larry as if the conversation about heroes and slackers had never taken place. “I always serve company on china plates.”
Emily didn’t know what to do except sit there with her hand on Larry’s arm in the desperate hope that one small touch from the woman he loved would calm him down while Sis helped Sweet Mama from the table. Andy was already racing toward the front porch and, from the looks of things, Beulah and Jim were heading upstairs. She hoped so. She didn’t know how she could get through the rest of the evening if Beulah kept acting like a bear protecting her cub.
And poor Jim. She couldn’t endure thinking about him right now. If an intimate family dinner could render him speechless and wrecked, what would a public outing do?
When the dining room was clear of everybody except the two of them, she turned to Larry.
“I’m sorry, darling.”
“Let’s just eat dessert and get out of here,” he said. “I knew it would turn out this way.”
“Beulah and Sweet Mama didn’t mean any harm. Really. They’re just getting on in years and set in their ways.”
“Thank God I don’t have to contend with my family.”
Why not? Emily didn’t dare ask, not after Larry’s humiliation at the hands of her family.
“I’ll make it up to you later, Larry. I promise.”
She led him onto the front porch where Sweet Mama smiled up from her rocking chair, Andy looked like an angel and Sis served up Amen cobbler on china plates. The moon hung low over the water, casting silvery patches on the porch floor. It was the kind of clear summer night that made you think there was nothing bad in this world that couldn’t be fixed.
* * *
Late that night, Sis sat on the front porch in the dark alone, heavy with the feeling that something awful was happening to someone she loved. It couldn’t be Jim. He’d been in his room ever since he left the table tonight without dessert. But Sis doubted he was sleeping, and even if he were, his slumber was unlikely to be peaceful.
And it couldn’t be Sweet Mama or Beulah. She’d checked before she came onto the porch. If they were bothered about goading Larry because he’d shirked his military duty, you couldn’t tell by the way they rested on their backs with their snores rattling the windowpanes. Had their bluntness been deliberate or was it old age? Didn’t they know if you prodded a coiled snake it would strike back?
Sis jumped up from the swing, her sister suddenly so strongly on her mind she wanted to race inside and call her. Sis walked to a patch of moonlight on the porch and peered at her watch. It was after midnight, far too late to call Emily and say, Are you okay? Did Larry punish you for what happened at dinner? Sis had no doubt he would. A man who would reduce his fiancée to tears over a dinner invitation would use any excuse to exert his power over her.
Or would he do worse?
Sis paced the porch until she was so tired she thought she’d fall over. Easing through the front door, she tiptoed upstairs, got into pajamas and fell into bed. But her sleep was restless, broken by nightmares and the helpless feeling of being chased and unable to run.
When the morning light pinked her windowpanes, she sat up in bed with a headache so fierce she didn’t know how she’d begin her daily routine, much less get through it with a shred of compassion. Just this once she wished she could wake up in bed with a good man who would say, Honey, you rest. I’ll take care of everything.
She eased out of bed, tiptoed to the bathroom, then downed two aspirins and waited. When the jackhammers in her head subsided, she went back into her bedroom and picked up the phone. Emily answered on the first ring.
“Em, you sound funny. Are you all right?”
“Just a little tired is all, Sis. Too much excitement.”
“I’m sorry about the way dinner turned out. Was Larry mad?”
“He was a little upset, that’s all. What man wouldn’t be? But after I talked to him, he was fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Sis. Let it alone. Andy’s downstairs dragging out more boxes and I’ve got to get to the café to put together an order list. I’m going to need more supplies for the wedding petit fours.”
Sis hung up, still hoping there wouldn’t be a wedding. But she had the sinking feeling that she was riding on a train that had already left the station. It didn’t matter how hard she yelled, Stop! Let’s all get off. They were going to end up listening to Emily pledge Till death do us part to a man they all considered a coward.
The aroma of coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen told Sis she’d better get moving. She dressed quickly, then went to Jim’s room and knocked.
“Come in.” He was sitting at his window wearing the white dress shirt she didn’t know if he’d slept in or worn during an all-night vigil with the moon or put on again this morning.
An unbearable tenderness came over Sis, and she sank into the only other chair in the room, the one at his desk where the encyclopedia was open at C for compass. Or was it compassion? Did the encyclopedia tell you that compassion was not something you searched for, but a feeling you carried in your heart whether you knew it or not, one so powerful it could render you speechless?
Sis studied the slump of her brother’s shoulders, the blond hair grown too long and straggling down the back of his neck, the hollow in his cheek as he tilted his head toward the view beyond the window.
“I thought you might want to go down to breakfast with me.”
“Yeah, Sis. The family dinner went so well.”
The flash of sarcasm gave Sis hope that the Jim of old was somewhere inside those baggy clothes.
“Did you see the look on his face when Beulah talked about 4F-ers?” she said.
“It would have been funny if Em weren’t fixing to marry him.”
“Well, she is, and there’s not a thing either of us can do about it except carry on.”
“You carry on, Sis.” He turned his back to her and stared out the window.
Sis sat there awhile, undecided, and then she went downstairs to brace herself with a cup of coffee. A day that had started off so badly was bound to get worse.
The scene in the kitchen stopped her cold. Sweet Mama was sitting at the kitchen table with her hat on. It wasn’t a garden hat, which might have made sense if she’d been working outside and just forgot to take it off. It was a wide-brimmed white Panama with a virtual flower garden on the brim, red and pink peonies the size of saucers with a big blue feather spouting out from the bouquet.
Beulah looked up from the coffeepot and lowered a look at Sis that said Don’t you say a word.
Sis hurried to the cabinet and turned her back to hide her dismay. She took her time selecting a mug from the array that had collected over the years. She selected one with Alabama the Beautiful from a long-ago trip to Natural Bridge. Then she stood there just holding on, wishing the grandmother wearing the flower garden hat was still the same strong woman who had loaded Beulah and her grandchildren into the car for a three-hundred-mile trip in spite of the fact that she’d had to fight for Beulah every step of the way.
When Sis had regained composure, she went to the pot and poured her coffee.
“We having a garden party in here.” Beulah smiled at her. “Where’s your hat?”
Sis grabbed her garden hat off the peg by the back door and sat down to have breakfast. Carrying on.
Still, wearing a hat at a battered old table for a nonexistent garden party would be mild compared to the facade she’d have to wear once she got to the café. How she would ever get through the petit fours and the cheese balls, not to mention the wedding madness that had overtaken the regulars, Sis didn’t know.
Sometimes she wished she could hole up in her room like her brother while Beulah trekked up the stairs with sweet tea and sympathy.
Six (#ulink_adf1ac93-63b6-5871-94c8-e6a207514233)
EMILY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT was wrong with Sis. Ever since their talk about having her wedding in the garden, she’d been snappish and forgetful. It had gotten worse since that awful dinner with Larry, and that was more than a week ago.
Yesterday Sis forgot to order coffee with chicory, and she still hadn’t brought those polka-dot sunglasses she’d promised Andy last week.
Still, nothing could mar Emily’s happiness. The cheese balls for her reception were in the refrigerator, the petit fours decorated with pink icing were rapidly piling up in the chest freezer in the pantry and she was going to do one last campout with her son before the wedding.
Standing in the backyard of Sweet Mama’s Café, enjoying a cup of coffee before the breakfast crowd started getting too big for Sweet Mama to handle, Emily kicked off her shoes and smiled as Andy raced around the ship, his untamable hair flying every which way. She made a note to add a trip to the barber to her list of things to do before the wedding.
“Can we camp out here tonight?”
“No. We’re going to camp out at Sweet Mama’s house.”
“Can we take the rocket ship?”
“We’re going to sleep in a tent.”
“Why can’t we sleep in the rocket?”
“Because then there wouldn’t be enough room for Aunt Sis. You want her to join the campout, don’t you?”
“I can sleep on the roof. See?” Andy clambered on top and stretched out. When his feet hung over the side, he curled up in a little ball. “Just right,” he yelled.
“That’s not a good idea, Andy.”
“How come?”
Ordinarily, Emily reveled in these meandering conversations with Andy, but lately he’d been trying her patience. Deliberately, it seemed. Was it because he didn’t want to share her with Larry or was there some deeper motive?
It was a relief when her neighbors Tom and James Wilson came through the back door of the café. Still bachelors at fifty and some said set in their ways, they were nonetheless two of the sweetest guys Emily had ever met. Tom was carrying a toolbox and James was wagging a little stack of lumber.
“We’ve been seeing you and Andy toting stuff out of your house for his little project out here,” Tom said. “Hope you don’t mind some help.”
“Of course not!” Emily hugged them both and they got pink in the face.
Soon the sound of hammering blended with Andy’s laughter as they shored up the cardboard boxes with scrap lumber. Tom looked like a rumpled, friendly elf with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his white hair sticking out from an old fishing hat with the lures still attached to the band. James was just the opposite. Tall, reserved and elegant, even with a hammer in his hand, he was dressed in a summer suit of blue pin-striped seersucker.
“That ought to do it,” Tom said, pushing back his fishing hat and reaching over to ruffle Andy’s hair. “Now that little rocket ship is sound as a dollar, even if it rains.”
Emily hoped the little ship didn’t have to be put to the test. She was still planning on a garden wedding, in spite of Sis’s long lip. As much as the new rose hedge would benefit from a shower, she didn’t want anything to ruin her wedding.
“It just needs this one last thing.” James bent over his toolbox and pulled out a wooden box with a little red steering wheel attached. It was covered with dials that looked as if they’d come from old car parts. Inside he’d rigged a set of hair clippers that buzzed when Andy turned one of the dials.
Being part of her little boy’s quest for the moon might be the biggest event in their lives. Neither Tom nor James had ever been married, and they both still lived with an ancient cat and their even more ancient mother, who had taken to her bed when she was fifty for reasons nobody knew or would tell.
Emily teared up, but she didn’t know if she was crying because Andy didn’t like Larry, or because the Wilson brothers had to find joy in a little rocket ship made from cardboard boxes, or because her own sister could end up exactly like them, with nothing to show for her years except gray hair and an old cat.
As they loaded up their tools, Emily said, “I’m going to give you an Amen cobbler to take home. Your mother might enjoy it.”
“Mother eats like a bird,” Tom said, “but she’s still partial to Sweet Mama’s cooking.”
“Good, then. That’s settled.”
They trudged back to the café, turning in the doorway to wave just as Burt Larson came out.
“I had some old sheets of plastic up at the house,” Burt said. “I thought I’d help out with that little rocket ship, if you don’t mind.”
Andy squealed and hugged the postman around the legs. Emily wished he’d show half that much enthusiasm with the man who was going to be his daddy.
She thanked Burt and then left him in the backyard, helping Andy with the rocket ship while she hurried back to the café. A cloud of sugar and spice rose from the cobblers Sweet Mama had lined up on the counter.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a big bowl of cobbler for dessert worked its magic on Andy? Wouldn’t it be great if the steam that rose around him softened her son so that viewing Larry as his daddy would be as simple as a hug?
They’d eat it tonight in Sweet Mama’s backyard, while the moon was high and the stars looked like a blanket of lights thrown across the sky. She was smiling as she got a big bowl to serve up Andy’s surprise cobbler, and a length of tinfoil to cover it.
Emily dug through the flaky crust and into a mixture of peaches and cherries so deep she could see her future. The sweetness of love long denied wafted around her, and the joy of having a real family of her own.
But as she dipped toward the bottom, she felt an overwhelming sadness, as if something waited for her in the dark with fangs bared.
“Oh, I’m just being silly.” She quickly covered Andy’s bowl, then wrapped cobbler for Tom and James.
“What was that, dear?”
Miss Opal Clemson was standing behind Emily, a little blue hat perched on her gray hair, a black patent-leather purse tucked over her arm and a wide smile on her face. Emily made a mental note to pay her a visit. Miss Opal lived just around the corner from her, and she thought how lonely it must be to rattle around in a house all by yourself.
“My goodness. Miss Opal.” She smiled at the petite piano teacher who had tried her best to teach Emily the mysteries of the keyboard. It hadn’t worked. Emily didn’t have a musical bone in her body.
“I was thinking about your wedding music, dear. Have you thought about using a recording of ‘Clair de Lune’?”
Burt Larson, just coming from the backyard, chimed in with, “Seems to me like Emily’s Big Event ought to have music plain folks can understand.”
The regulars at the next table joined in, and soon the entire café was abuzz with plans for Emily’s Big Event, spoken as if each word were capitalized and ought to be posted out by the Gulf on the huge billboard that advertised Baricev’s Seafood Harbor.
As the customers continued to offer unsolicited advice about the wedding, Emily saw Sis materialize in the doorway of her office, then turn and walk back inside.
Excusing herself from Miss Opal, Emily handed Tom an Amen cobbler then stowed Andy’s in the kitchen and hurried after her sister.
She found her seated at a battered oak desk glancing at the clock as if she could cling to the march of time and soothe herself with the thought that two o’clock would eventually come and she could close up Sweet Mama’s.
As Emily sat in the other chair, an uncomfortable old thing with a slatted back and a cane bottom losing some of its canes, she was certain Sis chose it deliberately to discourage visits.
“How was Jim this morning?” Emily asked.
“The same. Hunkered down in the house like he’s in a foxhole.”
“Maybe my wedding will be just the thing to bring him around.”
“I wouldn’t hold out any high hopes, Em.”
Sis always looked on the gloomy side of life. Emily refused to let it sag her spirit.
“Did you bring those special astronaut glasses for Andy?”
“I forgot. Sorry, Em.”
Good grief! Forgetting was so unlike her sister, Emily wondered if Sis was getting a brain tumor.
“Just give them to him tonight at the campout, will you? He’s worrying me to death over those glasses.”
“I don’t know that camping out in the backyard is such a good idea.”
“Why not? We always camp out in Sweet Mama’s backyard.”
“It’s too hot to camp out.”
“It’s never too hot for a six-year-old. Besides, it’ll be fun. We can pitch the tent by the new hedge so we can smell the roses.”
“Not the rose hedge!”
“Good grief, Sis. What’s the matter with you?”
Sis just clamped her mouth shut and refused to say another word, which was fine with Emily. She had too much on her mind to continue this silly argument with her sister. If she didn’t hurry back to that growing café crowd, there was no telling what kind of mess Sweet Mama would make. She seemed to be having one of her good days, thank goodness, because Beulah had stayed home again to be with Jim, who seemed to be going backward instead of forward.
Still, something had to be done to help Sweet Mama, but Emily didn’t know what. After the wedding she’d ask Sis. But not until her sister got in a better mood.
“I’ve got to get back in there,” Emily said. “You didn’t forget that we’re looking at dresses for the wedding this afternoon, did you?”
Sis rolled her eyes and looked as if she’d been asked to stand before a firing squad. But Emily refused to be daunted, even when her sister glanced at the clock again as if it had suddenly become her enemy.
“How could I forget, Emily?”
“Good, then. We’ll leave at two.”
Emily could hardly contain her excitement. They’d drop Andy off to stay with Beulah, and then Emily could enter that sacred territory she’d fantasized about ever since she met Mark Jones—the bridal shop.
As she stepped back through the office door, she drew the sound of laughter and lazy chatter around her like a beloved shawl. But the Amen cobblers gave off such a scent of sorrow she wanted to weep.
Quickly she skirted around them, wishing it was already two o’clock.
* * *
The clock on the wall had become Sweet Mama’s enemy. Every loud ticktock meant she was roaring closer to the edge of a looming precipice. Sis was saying, “Sweet Mama, are you sure you can lock up?” and she didn’t have the faintest idea what this fierce granddaughter of hers wanted her to put under lock and key.
“Of course,” she said. “Go on and have fun. But don’t pick out a blue dress for me. If you do, I won’t wear it.”
She’d been wearing blue on the four worst days of her life—the day in 1920 that jackass came home drunk and all hell broke loose, the day horrible Ethel Williams sank her claws into Sweet Mama’s son Steve and dragged him to the altar, the Christmas her son Bill and his wife, Margaret, had died in a car crash and the day one year later when she’d stood in the doorway of her café and faced down the KKK with her double-barreled shotgun.
She was standing now in the café on a hot July day in 1969, waving cheerfully at her two departing granddaughters and her great-grandson, but she had the eerie sense of standing smack-dab in the middle of a brisk winter day in the forties with the double barrels of her shotgun pointed at a ragtag group of cowards. She could almost hear their voices, almost see the white hoods.
Through the echo of time, she heard the bell over the café door ringing. Sweet Mama came back to herself in time to see her granddaughters departing. Now, what was it they’d told her to do?
She sifted through a mind that felt like a sieve. Her memories were leaking through the holes so fast sometimes Sweet Mama felt as if she’d wake up one morning and see her past scattered around her on the floor.
Something kept nagging at her, something she ought to remember. Suddenly, it came to her, and she hurried to the kitchen to get the notepad she kept in her voluminous purse.
Sinking into a cane-bottomed chair that Beulah used when she was peeling potatoes, Sweet Mama thumbed through the pages. One was titled “Customers.” Tom and James Wilson were there along with Opal Clemson, the music teacher and Burt Larson, the mailman—every one of them described right down to the roots of their hair.
Sweet Mama found herself shaking again, an old woman with a rapidly fading memory depending on a notebook to keep her straight and wondering how much longer she’d be able to hang on to her secret and fool her granddaughters.
Beulah was another story. Nobody could fool her. When Sweet Mama had first started forgetting things she’d said, Beulah, my mind’s going and you’ve got to help me.
Beulah didn’t ask any questions. That was her way. She just folded Sweet Mama in one of her wide hugs and whispered, I ain’t about to let Mr. Steve and that uppity Miss Ethel put you in a nursing home.
That’s when the Remembering Book had been born. The only trouble was, she often couldn’t get to it in time to bail herself out of public embarrassments. More and more, she had to throw up smoke screens or pretend she was just kidding.
The clock in the café chimed three, and Sweet Mama knew she was already an hour late leaving. If she didn’t get a move on, she wouldn’t make it home before Sis and Emily got back from their shopping trip. Emily would worry and Sis was liable to call for a search party.
She scanned through her book till she found a page titled “Locking Up.” It told how to turn the open sign to Closed, how to find the key to the café on a peg in the pantry, and how to put it in the top zippered pocket of her purse after she’d gone out and locked the front door behind her.
Sweet Mama read the entry twice before she got up enough courage to execute it. Then she gathered her hat and her purse and stood awhile, trying to think if she was forgetting something.
Finally, she ended up at the front door where the key seemed to have outgrown the lock. It took her five minutes to discover she was holding it upside down.
By the time she got to her Buick, she had sweat patches under her arms and a bead of perspiration lining her upper lip. Thank God the key she put in the ignition caused the car to roar to life. Sweet Mama drove out of the parking lot as smooth as if it were 1921 and she was driving her Tin Lizzie, heading to her brand-new bakery with Beulah at her side.
With the windows down, the Gulf breeze got under the brim of her black straw hat, making her feel twenty-seven again and ready to show the Jazz Age that a young divorcée with two little boys could start a business the same as a man, only ten times better if it’s a bakery.
She started to sing, but was shocked at the thin, reedy voice she heard. She and Beulah used to ride along in that Tin Lizzie, singing in harmony as good as the Boswell Sisters, Sweet Mama belting out the alto and Beulah adding her soaring soprano.
Determined not to be depressed on such a beautiful day, Sweet Mama glanced toward the beach. Terns called from sandy knolls and seagulls wheeled over the Gulf and everything was exactly where it ought to be. Sweet Mama didn’t know why Sis worried so much about her driving. She’d lived in Biloxi all her life and knew it from one side to the other.
The usual souvenir shops lined the highway, eventually giving way to a row of waterfront houses. Her own pink Victorian house would be coming up any minute now.
The bridge loomed in front of her, and she eased off the accelerator. Sweet Mama didn’t believe in crossing bridges at full speed. It was a sure way to cause an accident. As much as she enjoyed looking out over the water, she kept her eyes straight ahead till she was over the bridge and cruising down the highway where long-legged storks lifted toward the tops of cypress trees sprouting out of the shallows.
Always a lover of nature, she admired the sight while the Buick hummed along the highway.
Was that the sun already sinking over the water? Where was her street? Where was her house?
Panicked, Sweet Mama eased her Buick into a side road that looked like it didn’t lead anywhere, let alone her house where Beulah would be waiting with a glass of sweet tea. She stumbled out of her car and held on to her hat, searching her surroundings.
It seemed to her the sun was sinking in the east.
Then it occurred to her that she’d been driving along in exactly the opposite and wrong direction.
Frantically, she grabbed her purse out of the car and dug out the Remembering Book. But it was already too dark to read driving directions from the café to her house, and there was nothing written about a bridge to the unknown.
She was lost. And no matter how hard she searched the little notebook in her hand, it wouldn’t tell her how to find the way home.
Seven (#ulink_8da69715-2f85-5ad1-8478-cb06eddaf1e6)
DRIVING TO THE BRIDAL SHOP Sis felt as if she were in two places at once, behind the wheel of the car where she was borne along in a rushing torrent of Emily’s chatter and on the beach with the crowd of little boys playing a game of baseball.
“There’s no use counting on flowers from that new rose hedge,” Emily said.
Sis refused to think about the rose hedge till after the wedding. Even when she was in the garden, she skirted around the roses.
“Nothing’s surviving the heat except the oleander and the day lilies,” Emily added. “White oleander will be fine, but maybe I can use some baskets of pink roses to camouflage all that orange.”
His baseball cap was orange, that little boy on the beach who lobbed the ball toward center field and then spewed up a fine storm of sand as he slid into first base. He looked about ten, the age Sis’s son might be...if she had one. If she had a house and a husband and a dog in the backyard. She’d have a large breed, a golden retriever, maybe, or even a Border collie. Her son would call him Boy and play fetch with him in the backyard using a small baseball mitt to match the one she’d used when she was a child.
Her fantasy became part of Emily’s enthusiastic monologue.
“I thought for the music, we’d just move Sweet Mama’s turntable to the back porch and put on a record.”
The little boy in the orange cap was stealing into home. If she’d had a son, he would have done exactly that. He might even have grown up to be a professional baseball player.
“Sis, are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening.”
“I was going to use Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ but Larry doesn’t like that song.”
Just the mention of that fool’s name had Sis tightening her grip on the wheel.
“Emily, if you want to use that song, use it.”
“After what happened to her, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Good grief!”
Judy Garland had died last month of a drug overdose. The famous singer’s death had made no impact at all on Sis. Music was just something to fill the days that seemed to go on forever. When had she realized she’d never marry, never have children of her own? When had the door slammed shut to a future that included a man with dark eyes and gentle hands who would hold her close and whisper her real name?
She could almost hear his voice. Beth, Beth, Beth.
“Sis!” Emily grabbed ahold of the dashboard. “Slow down.”
“Why? I’m not five miles over the speed limit.”
“You’re going to whiz right past the bridal shop.”
If Sis had her way, she’d fly past. She’d sprout wings so strong they would carry her and her sister far above the shop with pink-striped awnings where fairy tales were wrapped in pearls and lace and sold to gullible women who expected life to be one big happily ever after.
Wondering if she was being cantankerous or practical or just plain jealous, she parked under the spreading branches of an ancient magnolia tree so huge it shaded three spaces. The only good thing she could say about this shopping trip was that she didn’t have to lock the car. Thank God Biloxi was still that kind of town.
Sis followed her sister into a shop that smelled like ripe pears. Little sachets of the potpourri were piled high in crystal bowls along the glass countertop.
A set of full-length mirrors along the east wall showed her sister, multiplied, surrounded by wedding dresses in an endless sea of white.
When the heart breaks it makes a sound so small there is nothing to show for it except a hand clutched over the chest and a sudden smothering sensation. Was it breaking for Emily or herself, a homely woman who would never catch a husband, let alone have a little boy stealing into home plate?
Feeling guilty and remorseful for her unbecoming jealousy of a sister she loved more than all the would-be suitors in Biloxi, Sis followed Emily into an area of curtained dressing rooms where her sister insisted she try on a bridesmaid’s dress. Pink, for God’s sake. Even worse, it had ruffles.
The mirror confirmed that Sis looked as bad as she’d imagined.
“I look like a linebacker dipped in Pepto-Bismol.”
“Hush up. It brings out some color in your face.” Emily walked around her, admiring the awful dress from every angle. “With some pearls and a touch of lipstick, you’ll be sensational.”
Sis had never been sensational in her life. She didn’t know how she was going to start now, with or without lipstick. She didn’t ask what color. She didn’t even want to know.
“Fine.” She couldn’t get out of the dress fast enough. What did it matter how she looked as long as her sister was finally going to get the wedding of her dreams? “You’re the one who ought to be trying on dresses.”
Emily rifled through the rack and held up a floor-length satin dress.
“I like this one. It’s the perfect dress for the perfect wedding.”
Sis wished she could believe that. But since she’d gotten a glimpse of Larry’s true nature, she felt like they were all in the middle of one of the hurricanes that sometimes swept through the Gulf Coast, blowing away everything in its path.
“The dress is lovely, Em. I’ll help get you zipped in.”
“No, no. I can do it by myself.”
Emily clutched the dress to her chest, and for an instant, she wouldn’t even look at Sis. Emily had ocean eyes, a blue so deep it could hold the endless moods of the sea, every one of them reflected in a glance. What was she trying to hide?
“I’m fine, Sis. You wait out here.”
She sank into an overstuffed chair covered in hideous-looking pink chintz wondering what that skunk had said or done to her sister now. Since that awful dinner, Emily hadn’t brought him back to Sweet Mama’s, and he certainly hadn’t shown his slick face in the café. Even worse, Emily, who told her everything, had told her nothing of any importance since that night.
By the time her sister reappeared, Sis was biting her nails down to the quick.
“What do you think, Sis?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I think it has too many sequins on the bodice.” Emily twisted this way and that in front of the mirror, viewing the dress from all angles.
“Okay. I’ll help you get out of it and you can try on another one.”
“No. You wait here. I want to surprise you.”
Emily selected three more dresses off the racks and disappeared once more into the dressing room while Sis sat there wondering what was taking so long and what in the world was wrong with sequins.
“What about this one?” Emily was in a getup with long, satin sleeves and a tight bodice.
“Can you breathe in that thing?”
“You think it’s too tight?”
“No, I just think you ought to be comfortable at your own wedding.” Emily’s face fell. Had Sis hit a nerve? “But what do I know?”
“I have two more I want to try.”
If the dresses had those silly little buttons in the back like the one she was wearing they’d be there till Judgment Day. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, considering who would be waiting for her sister at the altar.
“Hey, Em,” she called. “Before the wedding, why don’t I take you and Andy somewhere?” Maybe if Emily had some time away from Larry, she’d come to her senses. “Maybe up the Peabody in Memphis so Andy can see the ducks?”
“We’re going camping in the backyard tonight. That’s enough.”
Sis sighed. It was bad enough to keep fighting a battle she couldn’t win. Sitting still for so long in a shop filled with things as breakable as her sister made the situation even worse.
“Need any help in there, Em?”
“No. I’m not even going to zip this one. It’s too pink.”
“I thought you wanted pink.”
“Not this pink. I just don’t want white, that’s all. It doesn’t seem appropriate.”
Emily’s sensitivity to her so-called scarlet past made Sis want to smack somebody. Just about anybody would do.
In a whisper of blush-colored silk that looked like the underside of a camellia, Emily emerged from the dressing room and stood in front of Sis with her yellow hair glowing under the lights and her mouth turned into a shy smile.
“How do I look?”
Beautiful and breathtaking—even happy—were the words that would come to mind if you didn’t know Emily. But Sis had seen how Emily beamed every time she glanced in the direction of her son. There was something amiss here, something as subtle as an undertow in the Gulf you wouldn’t notice until it had swept you out to sea.
Sis looked beyond the swirling skirts, beyond the bodice beaded with seed pearls, beyond the tiny, long-sleeved lace bolero that covered Emily’s arms and shoulders. And that’s when she saw it, the darkening skin of her upper arm.
She leaped up and grabbed her sister’s arm, leaned close for a better look. It was definitely a bruise. Sis had the sensation of looking into a chasm, one so deep and wide it would swallow them all.
“Em, what is this?”
“It’s nothing.” Emily pulled her arm away, but Sis pushed her sister’s sleeve back until she had uncovered the mottled discoloration of a fading bruise.
“How’d you get this?”
When Emily didn’t want to answer a hard question, she got so still you could pass right by and hardly notice her standing there.
“You know I won’t stop till I find out, Em.”
“It was an accident, Sis. Really. For Pete’s sake.” Emily pulled away and pushed her sleeve over the bruise. “I was going down the stairs too fast and fell against the banister. You know how easily I bruise.”
Emily was lying. Sis could tell by the way her sister wouldn’t look into her eyes.
If rage were a country, Sis would be China. This was her baby sister, the one Sis had loved and fought for, even to the point of cornering the Bible school teacher at Biloxi Baptist Church and threatening to beat the snot out of her if she didn’t put a star on Emily’s chart.
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Elaine Hussey
An emotionally riveting tale of the bonds of family and the power of hope in the sultry Deep South.In 1969, the first footsteps on the moon brighten America with possibilities. But along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a category five storm is brewing, and the Blake sisters of Biloxi are restless for change. Beth ‘Sis' Blake has always been the caretaker, the dutiful one, with the weight of her family’s happiness—and their secrets—on her shoulders. She dreams of taking off to pursue her own destiny, but not before doing whatever it takes to rescue her sister.Emily Blake, an unwed mother trying to live down her past, wants the security of marriage for the sake of her five-year-old son, Andy. But secure is the last thing she feels with her new husband. Now she must put aside pride and trust family to help her find the courage to escape.With Hurricane Camille stirring up havoc, two sisters—each desperate to break free—begin a remarkable journey, where they’ll discover that in the wake of destruction lies new life, unshakable strength and the chance to begin again. Dreams are rebornand the unforgettable force of friendship is revealed in The Oleander Sisters, an extraordinary story of courage, love and sacrifice.Discover more at www.ElaineHussey.com
An emotionally riveting tale of the bonds of family and the power of hope in the sultry Deep South
In 1969, the first footsteps on the moon brighten America with possibilities. But along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a category five storm is brewing, and the Blake sisters of Biloxi are restless for change. Beth “Sis” Blake has always been the caretaker, the dutiful one, with the weight of her family’s happiness—and their secrets—on her shoulders. She dreams of taking off to pursue her own destiny, but not before doing whatever it takes to rescue her sister.
Emily Blake, an unwed mother trying to live down her past, wants the security of marriage for the sake of her five-year-old son, Andy. But secure is the last thing she feels with her new husband. Now she must put aside pride, and trust family to help her find the courage to escape.
With Hurricane Camille stirring up havoc, two sisters—each desperate to break free—begin a remarkable journey where they’ll discover that in the wake of destruction lies new life, unshakable strength and the chance to begin again. Dreams are reborn and the unforgettable force of friendship is revealed in The Oleander Sisters, an extraordinary story of courage, love and sacrifice.
The Oleander Sisters
Elaine Hussey
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
To the IT Girls, with love, laughter and gratitude.
Contents
Cover (#u5aeb6c6a-a058-5c3b-8e05-e4855b5a201b)
Back Cover Text (#u5202388e-afba-5517-b69d-8e86ec81a4b1)
Title Page (#u322c0188-b3dd-5c1e-9ea5-a488b3014a2b)
Dedication (#ue6e724e8-0f86-52b4-8209-3d5cd0de7d3a)
Chapter One (#uda3b9a15-adaa-5bc1-a425-b6891eff1308)
Chapter Two (#u591bf8df-e641-51ff-8fb2-1ed494d943f6)
Chapter Three (#uafd8407f-8a4a-5336-8981-824ac885272e)
Chapter Four (#u06bfc2bd-0e6a-5194-b0ce-029e8993c8c9)
Chapter Five (#u24d5c8d0-0e79-5798-a6b9-a12fd905d70a)
Chapter Six (#u38a54a71-14e5-57f8-9d60-188343db6101)
Chapter Seven (#ue659fc8b-881b-5d0b-820c-f6a4674ca1d6)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Reader’s Guide (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
A Conversation with the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ulink_aaa6eb97-5a78-5a2a-a7d6-c6413db87642)
THE DAY NEIL ARMSTRONG walked on the moon marked a summer where anything at all could happen. The brother you’d given up for dead in a war everybody hated could suddenly turn up alive, and the sister you’d protected all her life could finally be getting married. Any other woman would have been happy with the sudden turn of good fortune, but not Sis Blake. She was scared of happiness. Let too much joy seep into your life and you’d soon find yourself hunkered beside twisted wreckage wondering what you did to make everything turn out so wrong.
As if Sis needed any more evidence than her own history to tell her something awful was heading her way, the Amen cobbler cooling in the kitchen at Sweet Mama’s Café gave off the scent of secrets, a spicy smell so sharp it could cut away everything you held dear.
Still, Sis kept her troubled thoughts to herself. There was no sense spoiling things for her sister. Emily was humming as she sliced into the cobbler, serving up hope by the spoonful.
“Eat up, Sis.” Emily’s face was radiant with happiness and heat from the ovens. “It’s the best I’ve ever made.”
Sis forced herself to eat so she wouldn’t be the one who wiped the smile off her sister’s face, and Emily went back to her baking and humming, every now and then glancing out the back café window.
What was she seeing besides a backyard lit up with red and blue Christmas lights, though it was July and so hot in Biloxi the seagulls abandoned the beaches along the Mississippi Sound and pecked at Sweet Mama’s display windows trying to get inside where it was air-conditioned? Was Emily seeing a six-year-old son who needed a daddy? Was she seeing a little boy born out of wedlock and tagged with ugly rumors by a few vicious gossips Sweet Mama had run out of the café with a broom? Or was she seeing what Sis did, an endearing little boy in an outgrown Superman suit who was thriving in a family of women?
Even that worried Sis. Get too complacent and bad luck would hunt you down. The bite of Amen cobbler went down hard and sat in Sis’s stomach like an accusation.
“I’ve gotta get going or I’ll be late.” Glad for an excuse to push aside the cobbler, she hugged her sister, then hurried out the door, climbed into her sturdy black Valiant and headed toward the bus station.
Sis whizzed along the beach road, replaying the evening two weeks earlier when Emily had walked into Sweet Mama’s Café on the arm of a stranger and announced, “This is the man I’m going to marry.” Then she’d gone to every table and booth to show off her engagement ring, a stone so big it was bound to be a cubic zirconia.
Many of the diners were regulars who had watched Emily grow up, mostly at the café, shielded by the wide skirts and fierce heart of Sweet Mama. They knew how Mark Jones had gotten her pregnant, then run off to join the army to get out of marrying her, and they were happy she’d finally found somebody who would love her back.
Sis tried to be, too, but she was not the kind of woman to be swept off her feet. Emily’s fiancé was handsome in the too-slick way that made her skin crawl. Every time Sis glanced at him, he was checking his reflection in the Coca-Cola mirror behind Sweet Mama’s soda fountain.
Still, Emily had obviously seen something in her fiancé that Sis missed, so she’d trotted over to her future brother-in-law, determined to learn more about him.
“Larry, I guess you already know I’m the watchdog of the family.”
“You don’t do yourself justice, Sis.” His smile was wide and easy, this pharmaceutical salesman named Larry Chastain, who had swept Emily off her feet six weeks earlier when she’d gone to Walgreens to get some Pepto-Bismol for Andy’s upset stomach. “I’d call you Emily’s guardian angel.”
He oozed sincerity, and in spite of her reservations, Sis found herself smiling back.
“Tell me about yourself, Larry.”
“Ah, the dreaded inquisition.”
His smile was still in place, but Sis thought she’d seen a flash of irritation. Or maybe she was just looking for reasons to keep her trusting sister from racing to the altar with the wrong man.
“I’m blunt, Larry. Maybe too blunt. But I need to know my baby sister is going to be in good hands.”
“I love your sister and make more than enough money to give her and Andy everything they want and need. Emily tells me you’re a worrier, but rest assured, you have nothing to worry about, Sis.”
Emily had walked up then and whisked him off to the kitchen to meet Beulah. It wasn’t until they’d gone that Sis realized Larry Chastain hadn’t told her one single thing about himself. She stood there looking down at the floor as if she expected to see a greasy spot where he’d been standing.
What was it about Larry that set her on edge? Sis hadn’t been able to put her finger on the cause during that meeting two weeks ago, but driving along the beach road to pick up a brother who had received a Purple Heart, she wondered how Larry had managed to avoid the draft. The very idea of a draft dodger in a patriotic family where the men had served and sacrificed for their country made her want to snatch Emily up and run.
By the time Sis parked her Valiant at the bus station, she had to deep breathe in order to collect herself. It wouldn’t do for her brother to see her in this shape. She adjusted the rearview mirror in the off chance her reflection would show some magical transformation. Unfortunately, there she was—plain and chubby with a perpetual worry line creasing her forehead, and hair so curly it always looked like it had been styled by an eggbeater. Still, she tried to pat it into place, and even dug around in her purse to see if she could find a tube of lipstick, as if a little slash of red could turn back the clock. It had been two long years since she’d seen her brother, and she liked to think the sight of her would remind him of catching fireflies on summer nights and fishing off the pier and playing baseball in the backyard.
She turned up nothing in her purse but a wallet, a wad of tissue, two pieces of bubble gum and the stub of a pencil. Sighing, she pinched her cheeks, bit her lower lip to add some color and then put on a smile she hoped would make her look like a woman who had everything in the world she’d ever wanted.
As she stepped out of the car, Sis held out hope that her brother would be the one to turn her hornet’s nest of worry into something manageable, a funny story they’d all laugh at a dozen years from now when Andy was graduating from high school and Emily was baking a celebration cake at Sweet Mama’s. But Jim was leaning against the wall on his crutch, blowing smoke from a Lucky Strike into the humid evening air, his face as closed as a fist.
“Jim. Oh, my God, Jim!”
“Sis,” was all he said, and when she wrapped her arms around him, she understood that’s all he could manage. His flesh had vanished from his bones, and with it the buoyant spirit that used to radiate from him in waves that made him almost hot to the touch.
Without another word, she led him to her car and headed back to the café. He stared at the Gulf as they barreled down Highway 90, the breeze from his rolled-down window blowing his yellow hair straight back from eyes turned as glassy and unseeing as the blue china plate Sweet Mama had picked to serve his welcome-home cake. Sis’s hope flew right out the window. She imagined it sailing across the water like the favorite kite she’d loved and lost when she was six years old, before Emily and Jim were born, before their pink Victorian house across from the seawall became a place where a little girl had to grow up too fast.
“Jim, I know it must have been awful for you over there.”
He didn’t say a word, and who could blame him? Awful could hardly begin to describe it. The prosthetic leg he’d tossed into the car along with his duffel bag was a testament to the horrors he’d endured.
“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener.”
“Give it a rest, Sis. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s okay. Maybe some other time.”
That didn’t seem likely. As she turned her attention to the radio, Sis tried to keep her despair from showing. She found a station where Elvis Presley was crooning “If I Can Dream.”
Were there any dreams left in that car? Sis quickly switched to a station that wouldn’t remind both of them of all they’d lost.
“You won’t believe how Andy’s grown. And Sweet Mama’s still feisty as ever. She wanted to invite everybody in town to your homecoming, but I finally talked some sense into her. I thought it would be easier for you with just family.”
Jim turned her way with a shut-down face full of sharp angles and shadows, then swiveled toward the window to stare at the water. Was he watching the whitecaps? Remembering Vietnam? Wishing on the moon?
“Do you want to hear about Emily’s fiancé?”
“Not particularly.”
“Well, you ought to. He’s a jackass.”
“They run the world.”
“Not my world, not while I have breath.”
Sis had been taking care of her family since she was fourteen and that awful accident took their parents. She didn’t plan on stopping just because Emily was trying to outrun her past by racing toward the altar. And maybe that was Sis’s fault. She’d always encouraged her baby sister to be the fairy princess in a fairy-tale world.
Sis took a sharp left in order to avoid Keesler Air Force Base. No sense giving Jim any reminders that the military had mowed the Blake family men down like ninepins, leaving only him behind to pick up the slack. Not that Sis held out any high hopes of that happening. A man who wouldn’t even carry on a conversation about his family was as likely to see after their welfare as Sis was to have somebody stop her in the street and tell her she was beautiful.
Just look at the pair of them. She was an old sourpuss and Jim was still in the killing jungles somewhere on the other side of the world.
It was a pure relief to see the café, a fine, old building of moss-covered brick, reflecting the style of the Gulf Coast’s Spanish history, shaded by a couple of hundred-year-old live oaks and lit up like a rocket ship on blast off. Christmas lights and silver tinsel circled the plate-glass windows where gold lettering proclaimed Sweet Mama’s Café, and underneath in red was etched Home of the Famous Amen Cobbler!
Beyond the front window was Sweet Mama with her coronet of silver braids and a pearl brooch on her green linen dress, laughing at something Emily had said. That was a talent Emily had—making her grandmother laugh, making everybody around her smile. Everybody except Sis, who hadn’t found much to smile about since she discovered she hated the idea of spending the rest of her life selling pies, Amen or otherwise.
The flush on Emily’s cheeks could have been excitement or summer heat. With blond curls escaping from her ponytail, she looked sixteen. A strap of her yellow sundress had slid off one shoulder, and the blue apron she still wore was dusted with flour. Even disheveled, Emily was beautiful.
Sis would never be beautiful, with or without a dusting of flour. She would never look sixteen, even if she could get her frizzy brown bob into a ponytail. She would never be the kind of woman men wanted to sweep off her feet.
Envy ambushed her, so unexpected she almost crashed her car into a live oak.
“Watch out!” Jim grabbed for the steering wheel, but Sis slapped his hands away.
“I’ve got it. I’m just excited, is all.”
How could you envy the sister you’d dressed and fed and soothed at night with silly, made-up stories so she’d sleep with the lights off?
Perhaps it wasn’t envy but longing fueled by the perspective of age. How could Sis have known at fourteen that once you set out on a path, it can take you so far from your dreams you’ll end up at the age of thirty-four not even remembering who you once wanted to be?
She’d given up everything for her family, even her name. Beth. Nobody called her that anymore. Everybody just called her Sis, as if she were nothing more than the role she played.
The sign on the door of Sweet Mama’s read Closed for a Private Party. There was nothing private about it, of course. Tomorrow, word would be all over town. Sweet Mama would tell the breakfast regulars, and Emily was too gentle to refuse details to anybody who asked. By ten o’clock, everybody in Biloxi would know that Sweet Mama had made Jim’s favorite red velvet cake, and Emily had forgotten to take off her apron and Jim had refused to wear his leg.
There it lay on the backseat of Sis’s Valiant, another piece of sand in her craw. What do you say to a brother just returning from the hell of Vietnam? Why don’t you let me strap on your prosthetic leg so you’ll look normal and Emily won’t cry? Or do you just stand there with sand drifting into your sandals while Emily races out the front door, already crying before she gets close enough to hug her twin, the Gulf breeze blowing both of them sideways?
Maybe the Gulf was blowing all of them sideways, and had been for so long Sis didn’t know what normal was anymore. She thought about a brother coming home broken and a sister smiling as she raced toward disaster. She thought about a life gone so far off track she didn’t even remember the direction she’d been going.
Best not to think too far into the future, to simply put one sandy sandal in front of the other until she was standing in Sweet Mama’s, surrounded by the smells of cake and pie and fried chicken and freshly cut tomatoes from Sweet Mama’s prize crop, just standing there silent, gnawing on a chicken leg and watching over her brother and sister as she always had; watching as Emily laughed through her tears and Jim was engulfed by the ones who loved him best and would love him always, even if he never got his mind back from Vietnam and his leg out of Sis’s car.
“Aunt Sis! Aunt Sis!”
The TV perched on the edge of the serving bar was blaring wide-open. Andy sat so close he was crossing his eyes to see.
“C’mon over! They gonna land on the moon!”
For two cents Sis would get on that rocket ship with the astronauts. And she wouldn’t care whether she found the moon or not. All she wanted was to be as far away from her current life as she could get.
* * *
Sweet Mama was relieved when Sis quit glaring over her fried chicken leg at What’s His Name and walked over to join Andy at the TV. Why, from the look on her face you’d think What’s His Name was a fly set to land on Jim’s celebration cake and Sis was a flyswatter.
Larry Chastain. That was the name of Emily’s new fiancé. Sweet Mama would write it down this very minute if she thought she could do it without getting caught. But Emily might see her and start worrying all over again about her forgetfulness. And Sis was bound to notice. That girl didn’t miss a thing. And she wouldn’t stop at calling Sweet Mama forgetful, either. She’d use the scary words senile and hardening of the arteries and dementia.
“Larry Chastain.” Sweet Mama mumbled his name, hoping it would make a lasting impression. If she forgot and called him Gary, everybody would look at her funny. And her older son Steve, the one who wasn’t dead and wasn’t Emily and Sis and Jim’s father, would start that silly talk again about signing over power of attorney.
Sweet Mama would rather be six feet under than sign over any damned thing. She’d built this place from scratch and had run it for nearly fifty years and she wasn’t about to let somebody else take over now, especially her son Steve, who only came to the café when his bossy wife allowed. Besides that, he hated pie. What God-respecting man hated pie? No sirree, Bob. If anybody took over Sweet Mama’s Café, it would be the Blake girls. Emily could make an Amen cobbler the customers couldn’t tell from Sweet Mama’s, and Sis knew more about running a business than any man Sweet Mama ever saw.
If her mind ever did go, God forbid, she’d have her granddaughters running the show and not somebody with a power of attorney, thank you very much.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sweet Mama saw Emily motioning to her fiancé to go on over and join Sis and Andy at the TV, trying to communicate with gesture and smile, as she always had, that everything was all right.
Lord God, Sweet Mama hoped so. The scent of sun-ripened peaches coming from the Amen cobbler was so sweet, if you squinted you could see bees buzzing around the crust. Sweet Mama couldn’t recall what that was a sign of, but she knew it was a harbinger of something that made her bones feel heavy. She closed her eyes, just for a minute, and as clear as a summer day she saw a swarm of bees streaking down from the mimosa tree in the backyard, aiming straight for her head. She lifted her shovel to fight them back.
“Sweet Mama.” Her granddaughter’s voice drifted through the fog. “Sweet Mama. Wake up.”
Emily was shaking her shoulder, and when she looked up at her granddaughter, it came as a great surprise that she was all grown-up instead of four years old. Momentarily panicked, Sweet Mama looked around for Sis, who was no longer fourteen, but a rather unstylish and pensive-looking woman past thirty.
“Are you all right, Sweet Mama?”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”
“In the middle of my own grandson’s homecoming party?” Sweet Mama checked for the cake to be sure she was right. “I should say not!”
Emily sat down beside her and started patting her hand. Sweet Mama was torn between snatching it away, acting all huffy that her youngest granddaughter was treating her like an old woman and leaning into her to enjoy the petting. If you’d told her ten years ago she’d ever get to the age that she needed somebody treating her like a child, she’d have slapped you silly.
Before she could make up her mind which way to act, Gary came over and interrupted the whole thing.
“Larry, darling,” Emily said, and Sweet Mama thought about her narrow escape. She’d come within a gnat’s hair of calling him the wrong name. “I thought you were going to join Andy and Sis.”
“Your sister doesn’t seem to like me.”
“Nonsense, darling. You have to know Sis. She’s just protective, that’s all.” Emily patted him on the arm. “Go on over there now, and don’t spare your charm.”
He trotted off and Sweet Mama said, “Charm, my ass.”
“Sweet Mama! What a thing to say!”
She knew it was a terrible thing to say, but she wasn’t about to admit that it had just slipped out. To make up for the many ways she was now failing Emily, she was going to give her granddaughter the best wedding the Mississippi Gulf Coast had ever seen.
Sis was another thing—as tough and unbending as the live oaks that dripped with Spanish moss in front of the café. Sometimes Sweet Mama wished her oldest granddaughter would bend a little. She wished she wouldn’t be so hard on people. And the way she dressed...Lord God, the more Sweet Mama tried to talk her out of wearing khaki slacks and black blouses all the time, short sleeves in the summer, long in the winter, the more Sis resisted.
Still, Sweet Mama knew Sis would make sure her sister got a wedding grand enough to make up for all those years wondering if Mark Jones would have changed his mind and married her if he’d made it back from Vietnam.
More and more, Sweet Mama depended on Sis to take care of the family. Any day now, she might retire and travel to some of the places she’d read about in National Geographic. She’d always wanted to, and now could be her big chance.
“I think I’ll head to Pikes Peak first,” she said.
“What?” The funny look Emily gave her said she’d done it again, gone off and said something that didn’t have a thing to do with the conversation at hand.
She racked her brain trying to figure out what the latest subject had been. Emily was now looking alarmed.
She had to say something that made sense or Emily would tell Sis, and Sis would fetch Doctor...what was his name? He was an old fart. That’s all she knew.
“You said you were going to Pikes Peak, Sweet Mama.”
“Not this very minute, silly. But I’m getting so old, I’m liable to kick the bucket any day, and wouldn’t it be nice to be up so high I could see Heaven?”
“I don’t think you can see Heaven from Pikes Peak.”
“I was just kidding.”
Feeling backed into a corner, Sweet Mama looked around for a means of escape. And there was her poor grandson, leaning against the wall as if he could no longer see his place in the family.
“Help me up, Emily, and let’s take your brother some of that Amen cobbler.”
Food, that’s all Sweet Mama could remember anymore. She watched as Emily scooped up a big helping and then put a smile on her face as she carried it to Jim.
Sweet Mama got that heaviness in her bones again, an uncomfortable feeling that could be anything from old age to angels whispering in her ear. If she could just ground herself in the café, she’d be all right.
She glanced around at the pictures on the wall. They told their own story—the history of a bakery that became a café and a woman too fierce to give up, the friendship against all odds with Beulah, who had been with her every step of the way, the ever-increasing number of patrons who carried on meandering conversations spun out like a roll of silk ribbon, linking the past to the present and binding people together as surely as tree-ripened peaches blended with fresh cherries in Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.
“Amen cobbler, Jim,” Emily was saying. “I made it.”
Fear stung Sweet Mama as unexpectedly as a red wasp. Lord, she could have sworn she made that cobbler. Hadn’t she stood in the kitchen not more than two hours ago adding peaches to the batter? Or had that been last week?
“I’m not hungry, Em,” Jim said.
“Take a little bite, anyway. It’s your party,” Emily said. “Tell me if it’s as good as Sweet Mama’s.”
The way Jim was looking at his plate, you’d think it was filled with mud pies. What do you say to a grandson who’s standing close enough to touch but is so far away he’s no more substantial than the moonlight laying a path over the water?
Beulah’s shadow fell over Sweet Mama, a huge umbrella to shield her from a downpour of sudden sorrow.
“Honey, if you don’t eat that cobbler, old Beulah’s gonna think you don’t appreciate none of this cooking we nearly killed ourselfs over.”
“You’re still a con artist, Beulah,” Jim said. “And you don’t look a day older than when I left.”
“If you keep up that sweet talk, you’re gonna have a girl before we know it.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I ain’t holding my breath. I’m gonna put out the word to the reg’lars to be looking. Now, eat that cobbler pie.”
Sweet Mama puffed up with pride as she watched Jim pick up his fork and dig in. The war might have taken his leg, but it hadn’t stolen one iota of the Blake honor. She glanced at her granddaughter’s fiancé over there with all his body parts intact, sleek as a tomcat.
“Emily, did What’s His Name serve his country?”
“Please, Sweet Mama. This is a party. Let’s not talk about that now.”
“It’s a legitimate question, Em,” Jim said. “Did he?”
Suddenly, Andy shouted, “Com’ere, quick! That’s him. There’s a man on the moon!”
Emily raced off like somebody saved from the guillotine.
“Oh, it is, sweetheart!” She sat on the bar stool beside her son, her color suddenly so high she looked as if she might be the one standing on the moon.
Even Jim moved toward the RCA TV, and suddenly the whole family was riveted by the pictures being beamed back to them all the way from the moon. Relieved that she was no longer under scrutiny, Sweet Mama poured herself a glass of sweet tea and sat at a table close enough so she could see what was going on. It didn’t look like much to her, just a bunch of blurry black-and-white images. For all she knew, this man on the moon stuff could be a big hoax.
“He looks like a monster, Mommy.”
“That’s the astronaut Neil Armstrong in his space suit,” Emily said. “Listen, Andy. You’re watching history.”
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong said.
An impossibly huge moon shone through the plate-glass windows. That a mere mortal—somebody not so different from her, except younger—was up there this very minute walking around in the moondust filled Sweet Mama with such hope the café could hardly contain it. Her grandson was home safe, one granddaughter was at the beginning of a new life and the other granddaughter had the grit and the brains to turn this café into the finest restaurant in the Deep South.
Sweet Mama looked around the room till she found the picture she sought, hanging on the wall beside the clock and dated April 1, 1921. There she was, posing behind the cash register in the bakery she’d opened herself, with Beulah as her only help.
If anybody happened to ask Sweet Mama what she thought about the lunar landing, she’d say she’d already been to the moon and was planning to go again.
Two (#ulink_f9b29e73-4183-58c3-9880-885946758457)
EMILY DIDN’T NEED AN alarm clock to wake up. She loved sunrises and rituals and the small, everyday miracles of family. When dawn pinked her lace curtains she hurried to the window to admire the sky, and then she raced back to the bedside phone to call Sis.
“Sis, are you awake?”
“I am now, Em.”
Emily grinned. Sis might try to act like an old grump, but she counted on their early morning phone calls as much as Emily did. When you love a sister, you know her songs as well as her secrets. You know what makes her shatter and what it takes to put the pieces back together. You understand her as if you were standing inside her skin, counting the beats of her heart.
“I’ve decided to have a summer garden wedding,” Emily told her sister. “In Sweet Mama’s backyard.”
“It’s a disaster area.”
“It’s beautiful. All we need are a few chairs and some white satin bows, and it will be gorgeous.”
“Good Lord, Emily. Are we talking about the same backyard? It’ll take a ton of fertilizer, six weeks of rain and a flat-out miracle to get Sweet Mama’s backyard even halfway decent.”
“It might take all that if I didn’t have you, Sis.”
“Are you trying to flatter me?”
“Is it working?”
“A little bit.”
Sis’s sigh was audible, and Emily felt a prick of guilt.
“Listen, Sis, I don’t want to cause too much trouble. You need to spend time with Jim instead of fretting over a garden wedding.”
“If you want a garden wedding, that’s what we’ll have. Jim’s going to be fine. I won’t have it any other way.”
“He didn’t seem so fine to me, Sis. Bring him to the café today so we can feed him and fawn over him.”
“I don’t think he’ll come.”
“Why wouldn’t he want to come down to the café so he can be with all of us?”
“Because...” Sis hesitated. “Because he’s as stubborn as I am.”
What had she been going to say? Emily was certain it was something frightening Sis had edited out in order to protect her.
“You’re not stubborn, Sis, just certain. I wish I had more certainty.”
“If you’re not certain about Larry Chastain, don’t marry him.”
“I’m not talking about Larry.” Or was she? Emily felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction, as if she’d gone to the store for a carton of ice cream only to get home and discover the container was empty. “Let’s not be serious today, Sis. We have so much to celebrate!”
“That we do, Em. See you at the café.”
Emily dressed quickly, then went down the hall to check on her son. He was out of bed, wearing his Superman suit. It was from last Halloween and too short, but he didn’t care. A little boy planning big adventures with his favorite teddy bear, Henry, didn’t worry about things like dressing to the nines and combing his hair.
Andy hadn’t seen her yet, and Emily stood in the doorway, watching as he picked up the picture from his bedside table, Captain Mark Jones, smiling at his son from a silver frame.
“I love you right back, Daddy,” Andy said, then planted a big kiss on the picture.
That was her fault. She’d told Andy that Mark Jones loved him best. Was it wrong of her to tell such a lie? Wrong to let her son believe his natural father had wanted him, had loved him more than anything in the world?
She hoped that having a real daddy in the house would cause Andy to let go of the phantom father.
Andy spotted her and raced to hug her around the legs. When she knelt to fold him close, she put her face in his hair and inhaled the scent of shampoo and summer and little boy dreams.
“You think my daddy heard me?” Andy wiggled out of her grasp.
“I don’t know, Andy.”
“Maybe Heaven’s got big speakers like the ice cream truck.”
“Maybe so.” Emily picked up the pajamas Andy had dropped on the floor. “Did you comb your hair?”
“I forgot.” Andy raced off to the bathroom and turned on the faucet, making so much racket he sounded like a Little League baseball team. “I got important things to do, Mommy,” he called.
“Like what?” Emily shook out his sheets and tucked the corners into his bed.
“Build a rocket ship.” He poked his head around the door frame, his freshly wet hair sticking out at such odd angles he looked as if he’d had a big surprise. “If Nell Arms Strong can go to the moon, I can, too.”
“Why, yes, you can. You can do anything you set your mind to, Andy.”
“I might see my daddy up there.”
The weight of being a single mother descended so quickly Emily had to struggle against defeat. Where was that line between making sure your son felt loved by his natural father and letting him live in a fantasy world?
“Let’s not talk about that right now, Andy.” She caught her son’s hand, and he grabbed his old teddy bear. “Pretty soon you’ll have a real daddy in the house.”
Andy balked in the doorway, digging his heels into the shag carpet and sticking his head around the door frame with the anxious posture of a child searching for monsters.
“Andy, what are you doing? We don’t have time to lollygag.”
“Looking for a Larry Alert.”
Emily sighed. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Andy to warm up to Larry. Heaven knows, Larry had tried, too. He’d promised to take Andy fishing and to get him a new baseball mitt. He’d even said they could build a fort together in the backyard.
“We’ve talked about this, Andy. Until the wedding Larry will always sleep at his house, and then after, he’ll sleep here and we’ll be a family.”
Andy crossed his eyes, his way of saying I don’t want to listen to this. Maybe she’d been wrong to let him spend so much time at the café. Sis and Sweet Mama and Beulah encouraged every little thing he did. But still, what was she to do? Day care cost too much, and in her opinion, if you didn’t have family, you didn’t have anything worth talking about.
She went downstairs to her kitchen, which was her favorite room in the house, and began to fix breakfast while Andy raced around with his arms spread and his red cape flying out behind him. In a minute she heard him digging around in the pantry.
“What are you doing, Andy?”
“There’s a ginormous box in here. Big enough for me and you and Henry to go the moon.”
He dragged out the box their new television set had come in. A gift from Larry. Just one more piece of evidence that Emily knew what she was doing by marrying a man who could not only provide for her family, but was generous besides.
Andy raced back into the pantry and came out with an empty Tide box.
“I’m gonna take Aunt Sis, too. She knows ’bout boats and baseball and putting worms on hooks.” Andy heaved the Tide box into the TV box. “You got any more boxes? It’s gonna take lots for a rocket ship.”
“I’m sure there are some at the café. We can bring them home this evening.”
“I’m gonna build my rocket ship at the café. Aunt Sis can help. She knows lots of stuff.”
“Yes, she does. Andy, you need to eat your breakfast so we can leave for the café. I don’t know how the biscuits will turn out if I’m not there to make them.”
“You reckon Aunt Sis and me and Henry can finish the rocket ship today?”
“Good heavens, Andy. Why don’t you let it be a summer project?”
“’Cause I might need to make a quick getaway.”
The words settled into Emily’s heart like stones. What if the innocent recognized truths hidden from grown-ups?
* * *
Morning came softly to the Gulf Coast, tipping the waves with gold, rousing the terns from their nests along the beach and sending seagulls soaring across the water, looking for unsuspecting fish. After she’d hung up from talking to Emily, Sis threw back her sheet, slipped into sweat shorts, black T-shirt and gardening gloves, then tiptoed down the stairs.
Her sister had been wrong about Jim. He just wasn’t ready for public appearances, especially at the café where everybody knew him and would expect to hear a blow-by-blow account of his experiences in Vietnam. Sis decided to stick to the one thing she could control, fixing up the garden, bedraggled from a brutal summer of heat and bugs. The wedding was only weeks away.
Still, Sis didn’t mind the extra work. This was the part of the day she loved best, early morning when the dew was still on and she had the gardens to herself. Nature expected nothing of her. If she showed up to pull a few weeds and drench the beds with the water during dry spells, she was rewarded with prize-winning blossoms and tomatoes so big you could slice one and have plenty for five bacon and tomatoes sandwiches. If she didn’t show up, the resulting weeds became homes for the geckos and frogs Andy liked to catch and carry to the little frog houses he built all over the backyard with sticks and dirt.
It always amazed Sis that he expected the frog to be grateful, to set up housekeeping and be waiting when Andy stopped by later to ask how to catch flies with your tongue. Failing to get advice from a frog, he always turned to Sis.
Even if she didn’t have children of her own, Andy was the next best thing.
She eased the back door shut. Sweet Mama and Beulah were still asleep on the first floor, Sweet Mama in a big bedroom filled with mahogany furniture hauled from New Orleans in a wagon, and Beulah in a sunny room that had once belonged to Sis’s mother and daddy.
There had been no sounds coming from Jim’s room, either. Whether he was sleeping or lying on top of his covers with his eyes wide-open, Sis couldn’t say. All she could do was remember how he’d taken his duffel bag straight to his old room on the second floor last night, then shut the door.
Carrying the prosthetic leg he’d left in the umbrella stand downstairs, Sis had gone right in behind him.
“Don’t you ever knock?”
“You might as well not try your stinger on me, Jim Blake. I can still whip your butt.” She laid the prosthetic leg on the end of his bed. “I’m not going to let you shut yourself up here and have a pity party.”
“This is not pity, it’s a fact. If you want somebody to wear that leg, wear it yourself.”
“All right. Forget the leg for now. But don’t think I’m done. We lost Daddy and Mark to war, and I’m not going to lose you, too.”
“We lost Daddy in a car wreck.”
As if she didn’t know. Sis had turned and walked out of the room, the sound of crunching metal and the screams of her parents echoing through her mind. She’d been in that car, a teenager happy she didn’t have to stay home with the twins and Sweet Mama while her mother picked up Major Bill Blake at the bus station and brought him home for the holidays.
The driver who hit them was so drunk he didn’t see the red light, didn’t notice the car or the three people inside who were singing “White Christmas.” He never knew the look of surprise on Bill Blake’s face or the way Margaret Blake reached for her husband’s hand or the thoughts that tumbled through the head of a teenage girl flung clear of the wreckage. Sitting on the side of Highway 90 with her head hurting, Sis had checked her new red sweater set for damage.
What she should have been doing was checking her parents for a pulse, checking her future to see how she’d ever live with the guilt that she’d survived and they hadn’t.
Remembering, Sis jerked weeds out of the flower beds so hard she rocked back on her heels. She was not going to get mired down in the past and she most certainly wasn’t going to let her brother be one of those vets who returned from war but never really came home. The military had taken too much from her, and she was determined it would not take another single thing.
The back screen door popped, and Sweet Mama called, “Sis, can you help me with this?”
Her gardening gloves were on, her bonnet was askew and she was wrestling with a huge basket full of flowers. Plastic, for God’s sake. Sweet Mama wouldn’t be caught dead with a plastic flower in her house.
If Sis were Emily, she’d send up a petition to God, but she’d discovered if you wanted something, you’d best do it yourself.
“What in the world are you doing with plastic roses?”
“Shh, not so loud, Sis. I don’t want to wake that heifer.”
That heifer was Stella Mae Clifford. Sweet Mama marched to the edge of the yard and peered through the rose hedge toward the two-story Victorian house next door, a twin of theirs except it was painted yellow instead of pink.
Satisfied that her archenemy wasn’t about, she came back across the yard, chuckling, then plucked a pink plastic rose from the basket and secured it to the hedge with green gardening tape.
“Imagine that silly cow’s surprise when she wakes up and sees these on my rosebushes.”
Emily would die when she saw them. Still, Sis started taping plastic roses onto the nearly naked bushes.
“She’ll never believe you still have roses, Sweet Mama.”
“Yes, she will. She can’t half see.”
Black spot blight and aphids, enjoying the long stretch of intense heat and dry weather, had stripped every rosebush in Biloxi, including the hedge Sweet Mama was now decorating with plastic blossoms.
“Hurry up, Sis, before it gets daylight. We’ve got to get down to the café so I can put the coffee on for the regulars.”
“Emily can do that. Why don’t you and Beulah stay here and enjoy Jim’s first morning home? I think he could use the company.”
“Beulah’s in there now petting him like he’s three years old. Jim’s going to be all right. He’s like me. Made of strong stuff.” Sweet Mama plucked the last rose out of the basket and taped it to the disease-ravaged hedge. “Thank God he didn’t take after that jackass I married.”
There was a picture of their granddaddy on the walls at Sweet Mama’s, captioned simply The Jackass. Everybody knew it was Peter Blake, and everybody knew the story.
Sweet Mama had the misfortune to marry a man who was already married—to the bottle. Hardly an evening passed that he didn’t come home full of alcohol and bad attitude and smelling of another woman’s perfume.
After she had two boys, she made up her mind they’d not have Peter Blake as an example. One full moon when he came home sloshed and fell dead asleep into his bed, Sweet Mama went into the garden and pulled up two stout, dry cornstalks. Then she proceeded to tie her husband to the bed with the sheets and beat the devil out of him. When she’d whipped him sober, she packed his bags, threw them out the door and told him she didn’t want to ever see his sorry skinny self again.
Through the years he’d been spotted everywhere from Maine to California. The last they heard, he was up in Anchorage, Alaska. Wherever he was, that day he hightailed it was the last of Peter Blake in Biloxi and the beginning of Sweet Mama’s transformation from wife and mother to independent businesswoman, an unusual thing for a woman in 1921.
Some said Stella Mae Clifford was Peter Blake’s mistress, that he was the one who’d built her house next door. Once, Sis had asked Sweet Mama if the rumor was true.
“I like to keep people guessing, Sis. A juicy rumor is good for business. Better than a full-page ad in the newspaper.”
With the last plastic rose in place, Sweet Mama settled her bonnet on her head and shot a bird to the house next door.
“Take that, you silly old cow.”
What if Sweet Mama’s escapade with the plastic roses was not a sign of senility but a sign that the sassy, unsinkable Lucy Long Blake of years gone by was still shining through? What if she were made of such strong stuff she could defeat all the alarming signs of a mind and a body roaring toward old age?
“Let’s go inside so you can eat, Sweet Mama. Then I’ll drive you to the café. We’ve got a wedding to plan.”
“I don’t want to ride with you.”
“Why not?”
“You drive like a bat out of hell.”
It was true. Was it because Sis was in love with speed or was she thumbing her nose at fate, saying I cheated you once, see if you can catch me now?
“All right. We’ll go in separate cars. But you be careful, you hear?”
“Pshaw” was all Sweet Mama said.
Sis took her arm and led her up the back steps that might be a grandmother trap. Beulah was in the kitchen waiting for them.
“It’s about time ya’ll come in from the garden,” she said. “Breakfast is getting cold.”
“You and Sweet Mama go ahead and eat. I’ve got a few more things to do in the garden.”
“Not without something in your stomach, you don’t.” Beulah slapped two pieces of bacon between a biscuit and handed them to Sis as she headed back to the garden.
Sis decided to leave the plastic roses for a while. By tomorrow, Sweet Mama would have forgotten all about them, and Sis could remove them without causing a fuss. The rose hedge itself was another matter. She could fertilize and water a few of the bushes and hope for a little bit of greenery in time for the wedding, but most of them had to be dug up. She’d plant new ones tomorrow.
She went into the double garage where Jim’s baby-blue Thunderbird was parked, and the fishing boat Sis hadn’t used all summer. Thinking that fishing might be just the thing for her brother, she found her spade, then went back to the rose hedge and started to dig.
In spite of spindly growth with only a few blighted leaves, the rosebush had roots that seemed to go all the way to China. Sweat darkened her shirt and poured down her face as the mound of earth piled up.
Suddenly, her spade struck something hard. It was probably part of a brick or an old Mason jar. These old houses had yards full of junk tossed out and buried under years of accumulated dirt. Dropping to her knees, Sis leaned close to investigate, using her hands to carefully rake away the earth.
The bleached bones came suddenly into view, and Sis felt her breath leave her body. She bent closer to inspect her find. The bones didn’t look like much at first, maybe the carcass of a dead squirrel. Or something larger. A dog, perhaps. A family pet.
That was the answer, of course. On a day when the sky looked as if angels had polished it with lemon wax, what could possibly be awry in Sweet Mama’s garden?
Sis continued to dig, but as the mound of dirt collected at her feet and her discovery under the rosebushes revealed its true nature, she sank back on her heels, her heart hammering so loud it was a wonder they didn’t hear it clear in the kitchen. That was no family pet under the roses. It was a skeletal foot, pointing straight toward disaster. She felt as if everything tethering her to earth had been cut away and she was tumbling headlong into that dark hole with the bleached bones. Questions spun through her mind with the dizzying speed of a comet. Who? Why? And how?
But the one that burned a hole through her was What do these bones have to do with my family?
The sun had already climbed into a hot blue sky and beat unmercifully on her and her eerie find, the toe bones attached to the foot, the foot attached to the ankle. And what else? If she kept digging would she find the entire body?
She poked gingerly with her spade, each thrust meeting a sickening resistance that told its own story. The weight of sudden fear dropped her to her knees, but no matter how hard she stared at the awful thing in the hole, no matter how hard she wished she’d never taken her shovel to the roses, the bones wouldn’t go away. Bleached whiter than the wings of angels, they grew so big in Sis’s mind they took up all her oxygen, deprived her of breath and speech and hope. They grew so big she felt as if they were splitting the earth beneath her feet. Any minute now it would open up and swallow her whole, and along with her, everything she loved.
Slowly, Sis pushed herself upright. The woman who had come blithely into the garden expecting to tidy up for her sister’s wedding had suddenly become a woman whose awful discovery could destroy her family. Nothing would ever be the same. From this day on she would divide her life into two parts: before she found the bones and after.
The proper thing would be to tell the authorities, but then they’d have yellow crime scene tape all over the backyard during the wedding, reporters hounding their steps, gossips leaning on every fence post in Biloxi, speculating on the gruesome discovery in the Blake’s backyard. The scandal would be worse than when Emily got pregnant in high school and then was ditched by a boy who’d rather risk getting shot than marry her.
Frantic, Sis spaded the dirt back into the hole, telling herself after the wedding was soon enough to report this. Besides, she’d more than likely uncovered a relic, one of those Civil War casualties whose body had never been found.
She tamped the dirt carefully back into place, and then with one last glance to make sure the bones didn’t show, she stowed her spade, pulled off her gloves and went into the house.
“Lord God,” Beulah said. “You’re pale as a bar of Ivory soap. If you ain’t careful you’re gonna work you’self into a heatstroke.”
Beulah handed her a glass of water, but the lump of despair in her throat was so big Sis couldn’t swallow a single drop.
“Beaulah, do you know what’s buried under the roses?”
Setting her mouth in a straight line, Beulah turned her back on Sis and began washing dishes.
“More than likely a stray cat. I hope you covered it back up. Ain’t no sense ruining Emily’s wedding.”
“It’s not a cat. It’s a body.”
Beulah headed toward the table, a freight train gaining steam.
“You hear me good now, chile. Let it alone.”
Sis nodded or maybe she said yes through a throat so parched words got caught and couldn’t find their way out. A whole set of possibilities swirled through her mind, all of them tragic. If she could ever break free of Biloxi, she was going somewhere so frozen it wouldn’t grow a single rosebush. She’d find a place with snow so deep she’d need an Alaskan husky to find buried bones.
“I want you to go on down to the café and forget about them rosesbushes. You hear me now, Sis?”
“Loud and clear.”
“No use upsetting Emily and Jim, either. Just tell her to hold off on them German chocolate cakes. I aim to stay home and show Jim what he’s got instead of what he’s lost.”
Sis understood the things Beulah left unsaid, her comprehension so perfect she wondered if she’d ever had a normal life in the little pink Victorian house by the sea or if she’d only imagined it.
Beulah leaned down and folded her into a voluminous hug.
“Don’t you worry none. Everything’s gonna be all right, sugar pie.”
For a moment the thought of bones vanished, and Sis allowed herself to sink so deep into Beulah’s endearment she became a little girl again with her whole life in front of her, a shining path she could follow to the stars.
Three (#ulink_152c50e7-3b96-5e70-8abb-23d8a44de710)
WHEN SIS LEFT THE KITCHEN she could hear Sweet Mama down the hall, singing some rollicking old song from the Jazz Age. Did she know about the bones in the garden? The last thing Sis wanted to do was ask her and completely undo a mind already coming unraveled. Instead, she hurried up the stairs and tapped on Jim’s door.
“Come in.” He was standing on his crutch at the window with his back to the door, his shoulders hunched in a too-big pajama top and his sleep-ruffled hair sticking up like Andy’s.
The brother she’d sent to Vietnam was one she’d have confided in about the skeleton in the garden. This brother she wanted to fold into her arms and croon to the way she had when he was a child crying over a skinned knee.
“Jim, I’ll be heading to the café soon. Would you like to come with me?”
“Not today, Sis.”
He didn’t even turn around, just kept staring out the window as if he couldn’t believe the blue Gulf spread out before him, the white sand dotted with umbrellas and tourists, the seagulls wheeling through a sky the color of a robin’s egg. Sis didn’t even want to think what hell he’d seen over there, a vague euphemism she’d hated until she discovered there’s only so much horror a person can stand in one day.
“That’s okay, Jim. Take your time. Beulah’s going to be here today, cooking up all your favorites.” That turned her brother from the window, brought the ghost of a smile. “And I imagine Em’s make you something special at the café.”
“Tell Em not to worry about me.”
“I will.” Not that it would change a thing. Emily had always shared everything with Jim, the heartache, the joy, even the measles. Sis watched her brother standing there, sagging, a posture so foreign to him she wanted to cry. “It’s a beautiful day, Jim. Why don’t you get out your convertible and take Beulah for a spin?”
“Some other time, maybe.”
What would he do all day? Hole up in the room staring out the window? Sis stood in the doorway torn between the urge to stay and take care of her brother and the need to go to the café to help Emily and Sweet Mama take care of business. In the end, her practical side won. If the café failed, they’d all go under.
She hurried to her room to dress, and then got into her Valiant and followed along behind Sweet Mama in her ancient, oversize Buick. Thank God her grandmother wrecked nothing but a hydrangea bush backing out of the driveway. And miracle of miracles, she stayed on her side of the road all the way to the café.
Still, by the time Sis got there, she was a nervous wreck. She made herself stand still in the center of the room, just breathing, grounding herself in the familiar smells of bacon and coffee and sugar and sweet, ripe peaches. Emily had already baked six Amen cobblers that were cooling on the countertop, and Sweet Mama was standing safe and sound at the coffee urns making a special pot for her customers who always asked for chicory—Burt Larson, the mailman, Tom and James Wilson, the brothers who had a barbershop next door and Miss Opal Clemson, the music teacher who claimed she’d once played the piano for a concert by Leontyne Price, Mississippi’s famed opera singer.
It seemed so much like an ordinary day that Sis could almost forget her grisly find in the garden. But the Amen cobblers were sending up thick steam you could get lost in and never find your way out of, a sure sign of a disaster so huge even Sis wouldn’t be able to contain it. The bones in the garden were just the beginning.
She pulled herself together and found her sister in the kitchen wearing a pink shirt with long sleeves, for Pete’s sake, and it was already hot enough to fry an egg in the parking lot. Still, the sight of Emily covered with a dusting of flour and elbow deep in German chocolate cakes gave Sis a momentary respite from thinking about portentous cobblers and backyard bones.
“Hey, Sis!” Emily said, smiling as she poured batter into cake pans. “Where’s Jim?”
“He’s not up to socializing yet, Em.”
“I should have known that.” Emily scraped batter off the bottom of the bowl and held out a wooden stirring spoon. “Do you want to lick the spoon?”
She took up a spot by her sister and opened her mouth for the taste of raw batter, rich with sugar and butter. It brought back memories of childhood, with Jim and Emily perched on stools at Sweet Mama’s side and Sis standing at her elbow, listening to stories of the café in its infancy, waiting their turns to lick the batter from the latest confection in progress—a German chocolate cake, a lemon icebox pie, a Coca-Cola cake or Emily’s favorite, Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.
“Beulah said for you to wait on these cakes,” Sis said.
“If I had waited, there wouldn’t be any spoons to lick.” Emily bumped Sis’s hip, teasing her, and then crammed the huge stirring spoon into her mouth. It left a smear of cake batter on her cheek that made her look like a little girl.
“How do you know, Em? Someday I might make a cake.”
Emily whooped. “I want a picture of that. It would be one for the walls.”
Sis stuck her finger in the bowl and dabbed batter on her sister’s nose. Emily paid her back with a smear on the chin, and soon they were doubled over with laughter.
“Oh, my goodness.” Emily put the bowl and spoons into the sink. “If I don’t get this mess cleaned up, I’ll never be ready to open.”
“I’ll rinse.” Sis wiped cake batter off her face and moved to the sink. “You load the dishwasher.”
“Good,” Emily said. “That gives us time to talk about the wedding. I was thinking of putting flower baskets in the garden instead of depending on the roses.”
Pricked with sudden alarm, Sis just stood there with the water running unheeded over the dishes.
“I don’t think you ought to have it in the garden.”
“Since when? Just this morning you said it would be fine.”
“I checked it after we talked. It looks awful out there.”
“I know it’s not at its best this time of year, Sis, but I’ve always wanted a garden wedding.”
Sis had an awful vision of Emily standing atop the bones saying I do.
“It’s too hot, Em. Everybody will parch.”
“We can put the chairs under the shade.”
“I have a better idea. Wait till November when things have cooled off.”
Could she report the bones and get the mess cleared out of her garden by November?
“I will not have Andy start school without two parents. Okay?”
Was Emily remembering walking the halls of Biloxi High to whispers of easy and slut, her baby bump showing and Mark Jones already enlisted and gone? Was she thinking about how she’d had to sit on the sidelines while the rest of her classmates walked onstage to get their diplomas?
“Nobody’s going to call him names, Em. Not while I draw breath.”
“What are you going to do, Sis? Go to school with him every day?”
“I’m not above it.”
“You’re not going to get me to change my mind, and you might as well quit trying. I will not have my son called bastard.”
“All right. I understand. But at least think about getting married in Sweet Mama’s living room. We could buy some of those pink roses you love so much and put them in wicker baskets on either side of the mantel.”
“Forget it, Sis.”
“You could walk down the staircase and not have to trail your wedding dress in the dirt.”
“Good grief! Just let it alone. It’s my wedding and I’m getting married in the garden.”
Sis imagined Uncle Steve’s nosy wife, Ethel, poking around the pitiful rosebushes and finding the bony foot sticking out of the ground, imagined cops and pandemonium and scandal.
“But, Em, think what a hissy fit Aunt Ethel will pitch if she gets too hot out there. Or what if it starts to rain?”
“I’ve had my say, Sis, and that’s my final word.”
Emily huffed over to the stove and turned her back.
Sis wished she could start the day over. She’d sleep late and never see Sweet Mama tying plastic roses on the bush, never drive along behind her at twenty miles an hour in case she ran over another hydrangea bush. But most of all, she’d never dig up a rosebush and find bones.
Sis turned to the window and saw her nephew in the backyard, surrounded by boxes.
“Is Andy building a fort out there?”
“No. A rocket ship. He’s planning to fly me to the moon.”
“Maybe he’ll take me, too.” She looked back at her baby sister standing there oblivious in her long-sleeved shirt, expecting every downpour to yield a rainbow. “I’m sorry, Em. I’m such a grump.”
“You’re not totally grumpy. Just a little.”
“I’m going outside to cool off and visit with Andy, and when I come back inside, we’ll plan a wedding that will turn your enemies green with envy.”
“I don’t have enemies,” Emily said without a single hint of irony.
Lord, Sis hoped that was true. She raced through the door, the scent of Amen cobbler following her all the way, so strong it felt like somebody squeezing her heart. Outside, she leaned against the wall, trying to catch a deep breath. What would become of her family if she worried herself into a heart attack? It could happen. Last year a woman not three years older than Sis had keeled over on the front pew of the Biloxi Baptist Church, and her with three children to look after and a husband, besides.
“Hey, Aunt Sis,” Andy called. “How many batteries you got?”
He was standing on top of a TV box in his Superman suit, his blond cowlick sticking up in front like the crest of a baby bird, his sturdy legs beneath the too-short pants turned dark gold from a summer in the sun, the big red S on his shirt faded from too many washings. His feet were bare and his face was filled with excitement.
“I don’t have any batteries in my pockets, but I’ll bet I can find some. What are they for?”
“My rocket ship. It’s gonna take lots to get to the moon.”
Hope is such a fragile thing, a butterfly wing you could crush with one finger. Walking a thin line, terrified of leaning too far to the left or the right, Sis squatted beside her nephew at the pile of boxes.
“Let me help you with that rocket ship.”
“Me and you’s gonna build the bestest one!” Andy scrambled among the pile and came up with a box still smelling of laundry detergent. “Mommy won’t let me use a knife. Can you cut the window, Aunt Sis?”
“I can.”
As she pulled out a pocketknife and cut a window right over the T on the Tide box, Sis missed the family she might have had as if they were real, as if she had a husband who kept her picture on his desk, a daughter named Susan who had inherited her aunt Emily’s beautiful blond hair and a sturdy son named Bill after her own father, a son who loved baseball and digging for worms and sitting on the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River with a fishing pole.
When Andy raced inside to peer out through the hole, her phantom family vanished, leaving her in the backyard of the café with a nephew whose grin lit a candle in her heart.
“Oh, boy. When I fly to the moon, I can see my daddy up there in the stars.”
If Sis were in her sister’s shoes, she’d never have painted Mark Jones as a hero. In her book, there was nothing heroic about leaving a pregnant girlfriend to face the fallout in a Bible Belt society. But what did she know about love and children? She’d never had either.
“Do you think I’ll see my daddy, Aunt Sis?”
“Maybe.”
Andy got that little boy skeptical look that said I know you’re going to break my heart with the truth but I love you enough to stand here and smile while you do it.
“If you look with your heart, and maybe wear a special pair of glasses.”
“What kinda glasses?”
“The kind I’ve got back home in my dresser drawer.” It was an old pair of sunglasses, red with white polka dots and cat-eye frames. “Every astronaut ought to have a pair. I’ll give them to you.”
Andy clambered out of the box, then raced to the base of a live oak and dug a while in the dirt. When he came back, he handed Sis a white rock the size of a hen egg, along with a good-size chunk of soil.
“You the bestest, Aunt Sis. This is for you.”
“Thank you, Andy.”
“It’s a magic rock.”
“What does it do?”
“Wish real hard and rub it. See? Like this.” He put his grubby little hand on the rock and rubbed with all his might. “Then your wish’ll come true.”
Sis kissed the top of his head, which smelled like sunshine and salty sea air and optimism.
“I’ve got to get back inside, but you keep up the good work, Andy.”
Grinning, he made a fist and bumped it against hers.
“Later, ’gator,” he said.
“After a while, crocodile.”
Before she got to the back door, she rubbed the rock in her pocket. Just in case it might still contain a little boy’s belief in magic.
* * *
That afternoon Sis left the café early, and if you looked close enough you’d see a cloud of anxiety over her head as dark as a flock of blackbirds. You’d see a woman who has lost her moral compass, one who stopped seeing in black-and-white the minute she dug under the rosebushes.
Driving by the seawall as familiar as the peaches in Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler, Sis glanced at the beach, hoping for distraction, longing to see a little boy in a baseball cap hitting a fly ball into a blue surf pounding the white sand. But all she saw were shades of gray. No color. No right. No wrong. Just a vast shadowy land where the truth was hidden under a rosebush and anything at all was possible.
Finally, the Victorian house came into view, but it no longer put Sis in mind of a tall glass of sweet tea on the front porch swing. She parked and hurried straight to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Beulah or Jim.
Perhaps it was movement in the backyard that caught her eye, or it could have been instinct, sharpened by years of trouble and perfected to art by constant vigilance.
Beulah wore a red hat with a brim wide enough to shade two people, and in her hand was a shovel.
Sis barreled through the back door and took the steps two at a time.
“Beulah! What on earth are you doing?”
“What does it look like, Sis? I’m planting roses.”
There they were, new rosebushes all in a row, standing like sentinels over the bones. Even the bush that had sheltered the foot had vanished, and in its place was a Don Juan climber, its petals dripping to the ground red as blood. Closer inspection revealed that these end-of-summer bushes were hardly better than the disease-ravaged ones they’d replaced. Instead of rich, green branches full of life, the new bushes were mere skeletons, their limbs holding a puny offering of sparse leaves and small blossoms.
“Good Lord. Where did you find these?”
“Closeout sale at the corner market.”
“They won’t live in this heat.”
“Yes, they will. I aim to water ’em every day.” Beulah stripped off her gloves and handed Sis the shovel, as matter-of-factly as if she’d just planted prizewinning roses in a spring garden. “Stow this, will you, Sis? I’m gonna get some sweet tea before I melt.”
Sis held on to the shovel and stared at the Don Juan, paralyzed. Were the bones still under there? Or had Beulah moved them?
Sis had an insane urge to ram the sharp edge of the shovel under the bush and see for herself, but it was broad daylight and there was no telling who might be looking out a window or passing along the street. What would they see? Would they see a decisive woman who never even blinked when she chose family over college, who ate the same thing every morning without once wondering if corn flakes would be better for her than biscuits and bacon, who got out of bed every day at the same time and did her job in precisely the same way without ever stopping to cry over what she might be missing? Or would they see a divided woman split by the need to protect her family at all costs and the urge to discover the truth behind the awful secret in her garden?
It seemed to Sis that the bones under her feet were calling out to her, trying to tell her of something she’d missed, some little clue from her past that might reveal why they were there.
She thought back over the years. Once there had been a mimosa tree where the rose hedge stood. Its twin was still on the other side of the yard, its branches sturdy enough to hold a tree swing for Andy. She tried to remember when the first mimosa tree had come down, but the red petals drifting over her shoes from the newly planted Don Juan brought her mind back from the past and into the awful present.
The back door popped open and Beulah called, “Everything all right out here, Sis?”
“Everything’s fine.”
As she hurried off to the garage to stow the shovel, she tasted the bitterness of her lie. Everything she’d held true about herself and her history was suddenly in question.
She heard the sound of Sweet Mama’s powerful old Buick engine, followed by the slamming of a car door and Emily’s voice. “Andy, be careful and don’t drop the pie.”
She’d followed Sweet Mama to make sure she got home all right, just as she’d promised Sis she would. The pie would be the coconut cream she’d made at the café especially for Jim. Soon Emily would be driving to her own house where she would stand in her little blue-and-white kitchen making cookies for Andy and dreaming of having a family complete with a husband.
Sis tried not to even think about that, about dreams that turned out wrong and dreams that got left in the dust.
“Watch your step, Sweet Mama!” Emily’s voice echoed through the stillness of a clear afternoon. She’d be taking Sweet Mama’s elbow now as they climbed the front porch steps, something neither sister would have imagined the need for five years earlier.
The front screen door popped, and Beulah called out, “Ya’ll set that pie in the kitchen, then come back here on the porch under the ceiling fan. I got sweet tea made.”
Their voices receded and Sis stood in the doorway of the garage, half in shadow, half in sun, which seemed to her a metaphor for her life. Soon she would join her family, smiling while she sipped iced tea and discussed her sister’s wedding. Looking at her, nobody would know she was the keeper of a nightmare, one so dark that if she made a false move her world would crumble. And with it the family she loved.
Four (#ulink_35e91cf9-c3bd-5336-b2d7-498eb39611a4)
SWEET MAMA’S KITCHEN SMELLED of fried chicken and field peas cooked with fatback, sweet corn seasoned with butter and sweet potato casserole cooked with chunks of pineapple, each scent as distinctive to Emily as if she’d personally stood at Beulah’s elbow watching her cook for Jim. While Andy began a reconnaissance of the area that included looking in every cabinet and peering out the window, Emily set the coconut cream pie on the table beside a platter piled high with Beulah’s biscuits.
The kitchen was Emily’s favorite room in Sweet Mama’s house, or any house, for that matter. Her best memories were here. She ran her hands over the scarred surface of the table. She’d sat at that same table while Sis struggled to explain the mystery of numbers and her twin brother breezed through the multiplication table as if he’d been born knowing it. She pictured her own little maple table and how Larry would soon bend patiently over Andy, helping him add and subtract and listening to him as he read about Dick and Jane from the first grade reader. Did they still teach Dick and Jane? She could hardly wait to find out.
“Mommy!” Andy tugged at her skirt. “Sis is out in the backyard! Can I go out and make frog houses with her?”
“That’s a wonderful idea. But first go out to the front porch and tell Beulah and Sweet Mama I’m going upstairs to see Uncle Jim.”
“’K!” He raced off, his sneakers skidding in the polished hallway.
“Andy,” she called. “Don’t run in the house.”
“I won’t.”
Emily grinned. Of course he would. What little boy ever walked when it was so much more fun to run?
She got a dessert plate from the cabinet and cut a generous slice of pie, then headed upstairs to find her brother. Beulah said he hadn’t come out of his room all day. When Emily got upstairs and pushed open his door, she saw evidence of his hermitlike day—his bed still unmade, the plate of half-eaten chicken and the glass with ice melting in leftover tea. Jim was sitting in a straight chair at his desk, an open book in front of him, his beard stubble so blond it was barely visible.
“Em!” His smile reminded her of Andy’s, except for the vacant eyes.
“What are you reading?”
She walked over and put her arm around his shoulder, and he gestured toward the page, Constellations and Constitution in Volume C of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He could have been reading about either one with equal curiosity.
“I hope Andy inherited your brain,” she said.
“I hope he’s nothing like me.” The force of his passion catapulted him from his chair, while Emily stood by, helpless. “Look at me, Em! I can’t even stand the sight of my own face.”
“It’s a dear face. I love your face.” She cupped her brother’s cheeks. “Look at me, Jim.”
“Don’t, Em.” He jerked away. “Everywhere I turn I see the eyes of the dead staring back at me. Even when I look at my own sisters.”
He grabbed his crutch and clomped to the window while she stood in the middle of the room wondering what to do. When Andy was hurting she could pull him onto her lap and smooth his hair and sing-song his favorite nursery rhyme. Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King’s horses and the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Who would put her brother back together?
She joined him at the window and linked her arm through his, then just stood there, not saying a word, scarcely daring to breathe in case he pulled away. She tried to think of something wise to say, but in the end nothing came to her. In the end she said a silent prayer, not even knowing whether God would listen to something as simple as Help my brother. Help me help my brother.
A breeze came through the open window, welcome after a day of intense heat, and voices drifted through—the indecipherable, meandering conversation of Sweet Mama and Beulah on the front porch and the clear, high voice of Andy in the backyard, peppering Sis with questions.
“Do holes have bottoms?”
“Can I dig to China?”
“Do frogs get married?”
“Is first grade scary?”
“Can I come home if I don’t like it?”
The sun was lowering toward the western horizon, reminding Emily she’d promised to cook dinner for Larry. An anxiousness rose inside her, the kind of wishy-washy feeling she hated. How could she leave her brother and yet how could she disappoint her fiancé? A mosquito buzzed through the window, and she balanced on one foot to scratch the back of her leg. She got red welts every time one bit her.
“Jim?” He turned toward her with a look of surprise, as if he were just returning from a faraway country and couldn’t believe she was there waiting for him. “If I invite Larry over for dinner here, will you come down and eat with us?”
“I’m not good company.”
“You don’t have to be good company. In fact, you don’t even have to make conversation. I’d just like for you to spend some time with the man who is going to be your brother-in-law.”
His long silence was bound to be no. She scratched her mosquito bite again, waiting.
When her brother finally shrugged and said, “Okay,” Emily felt as if she’d successfully led an expedition to the North Pole.
She left him heading toward the bathroom to shave, and went downstairs to call Larry. When she got to the telephone in the kitchen, she lost some of her resolve. Should she discuss the revised dinner plans with Beulah and Sis first? But what if Larry said no, and then she’d have to tell them he wasn’t coming?
“Emily?” Sis was suddenly standing in the doorway, holding the hand of a dirty little urchin after an enthusiastic excavation of the backyard.
“Good Lord, Sis, you startled me.”
“What’s up, Em? You look like a scared rabbit.”
“Mommy, what’s a scared rabbit?”
“Go wash your hands and face, Andy,” she told her son. “I’ll explain later.”
As he marched off, she told Sis about her plans to invite Larry over for dinner and how it might turn out to be a wonderful ploy to get their brother out of his bedroom.
“That’s great, Em!”
“I thought I could find something in the pantry to fix.”
“Good Lord, Emily. Beulah always cooks enough to feed an invasion of Martians. And don’t you worry about Sweet Mama.”
“Are the Martians coming?” Andy was back, standing in the doorway bouncing up on his toes in his excitement.
“No, the Martians are not coming.” Emily studied the level of dirt still on her son. “You forgot to wash behind your ears. I could build a frog house with that leftover dirt.”
“’K.”
As her son raced off once more and her sister puttered around the kitchen—washing her hands, pouring herself a glass of iced tea—Emily felt herself settle down. Apart from her family and Sweet Mama’s café, she sometimes felt a bit out of her element, as if she’d taken a wrong turn on the road and ended up in an unfamiliar place.
“Okay, then.” She smiled as Sis settled into a kitchen chair with her tea. “That settles everything.”
“It’s a good idea, Em. Larry needs to learn more about the family he’s marrying into.”
The way her sister’s eyes gleamed, it seemed to Emily the shoe was on the other foot: Sis was the one who wanted to find out about the man Emily would soon be calling her own. Still, as she picked up the kitchen phone and dialed Larry’s work number, she even felt a small sense of accomplishment.
When she said, “Hello, Larry,” and he called her darling, she saw her future unfold as a series of Hallmark cards, each scene a perfect depiction of a happy family.
Words spilled out of her so fast, she got tangled up and had to start over. By the time she’d finished telling him about the change of plans, she was flushed as if she’d been running.
There was a deep silence at the other end of the line.
“Larry? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, thank goodness. For a minute, I thought we’d been cut off.”
“No, I was thinking...how could you just change plans without even discussing it with me?”
“Well, of course I should have. I know that.” She bit her lip, feeling somehow inadequate and wondering what she’d done that was so wrong. “Still, my brother is just home from the war, and he’s feeling so alone right now, I thought it would be nice if you could come over and cheer him up.”
Why didn’t Larry say something?
“You know, a little man-to-man talk in a house full of women?” She waited, nervous, and still Larry said nothing. “Of course, there’s Andy, but I’m afraid his conversation runs to frog houses and rocket ships.”
Emily twisted the phone cord around her fingers, and a little pulse started pounding in her temple.
“Larry? Are you still there?” She put a hand to her forehead and silently counted to three. “Say something. Please.”
Sis set down her glass in that slow, deliberate manner she had when she was getting ready to wade into the middle of a situation gone bad. Even worse, she pushed back her chair. Emily frantically signaled her sister to sit back down.
When Larry finally decided to talk to her again, she was so flustered she nearly dropped the receiver.
“You said you’d make spaghetti and meatballs, Emily.” He was breathing hard, like somebody having a heart attack.
“Larry? Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right. Just disappointed, that’s all.”
“I’m sorry, Larry.” She looked down at her engagement ring and twisted it on her finger. “I was just... I don’t know what I was doing.” She squinted at her ring. “I was just trying to be helpful, that’s all.”
Sis was scowling so hard it seemed to Emily the whole room had gone dark.
“I was looking forward to your spaghetti, Emily,” Larry told her.
“I promise you I’ll make spaghetti and meatballs the next time. And listen, Beulah is one of the best cooks on the Gulf Coast. I know you’re going to enjoy having dinner with my family.”
“I even told my boss I was eating spaghetti my fiancée made.”
“I’m sorry, Larry. I really, really am.”
She couldn’t even look at Sis. She knew what she’d see: a sister getting ready to explode.
Emily frantically searched for a way to salvage the situation. It was too late to fix spaghetti from scratch and still have dinner at her house at a decent hour. But she could pick up some spaghetti sauce on her way home and doctor it up so Larry wouldn’t be able to tell it from the real thing.
“Listen, Larry. Just forget I even mentioned dinner at Sweet Mama’s. I’ll hurry on home to cook and see you in a little while. Okay?”
His sigh was as dramatic as Andy’s when he’d been told he had to take a bath before going to bed.
“I forgive you, sweetheart. And I’ll come to Sweet Mama’s for dinner. But next time, discuss plans with me first, okay?”
“Of course. I will.”
Sis was out of her chair before Emily had even hung up the phone.
“That rat! What did he say to you?”
“He was disappointed about the spaghetti, Sis, that’s all.”
“Disappointed, my hind foot. It looks like he put you through the wringer.” Sis stomped over to the sink and dumped the rest of her iced tea so hard ice cubes bounced over the lip of the sink and rattled to the floor. “I’d like to slap some sense into him. And if he gives me half a chance, I will.”
“We have to all get along.”
“If he wants to get along with me, he’d better start treating my sister right.”
“He treats me just fine. Really, he does.”
“Do you call that fine, being reduced to a nervous wreck just because you invited him to dinner?” Sis snatched up a dish towel and attacked the ice cubes on the floor. “Apologizing for Pete’s sake, as if you’d done something wrong!”
“Please, Sis! He’s going to be my husband!”
Sis went very still, collecting her rage the way the air collects turbulence right before a tornado rips through. If you didn’t know Sis, you’d tremble in your shoes; you’d expect her to tear into you any minute and try to straighten you out. But Emily saw with a sister’s heart. She watched Sis rein in her feelings and bury them so deep not a glimmer was left behind.
Sis dumped the ice cubes back into the sink, easy now in her movements and her posture.
“All right. I’ll behave.”
“Oh, Sis! I knew you would.”
“But that doesn’t mean I like it, Em.”
“I know.”
“I don’t like this man and I don’t like the idea of you marrying him. But we’ll get through the evening. Now I’m going to clean up and then warn Sweet Mama and Beulah.”
“Warn?”
“Tell. Is that better?”
“Much.”
“Em, I want you to think about the way Larry acted over something as simple as coming here for dinner. If he’s this controlling now, what will he be like after the wedding?”
“Sis, don’t start on Larry again.”
“I’m not starting on Larry. Just promise me you’ll think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I promise.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see you in a little bit.”
Sis left the kitchen while the conversation with Larry burned through Emily. Not even the endearment he’d used to say goodbye could erase the sense that she’d headed out to pick a basketful of ripe strawberries and ended up in a tangle of briars. She bent over the sink to splash cool water on her hot face, then stood with water dripping down her chin, simply stood there staring into space.
Sis’s footsteps echoed on the wooden floors upstairs. She’d be going about her business, getting cleaned up for dinner. From the direction of the hall closet came sounds of Andy’s rambunctious search, probably for one of Sis’s old balls and her baseball bat. Out on the porch, her grandmother and Beulah would be drinking sweet tea from tall, cool glasses, blissfully unaware of the little storm that had swept through the kitchen.
After a little while, Emily shook herself like a woman coming out of a bad dream, then searched the pantry till she found an apron. She wasn’t going to let this little setback spoil the evening. It was going to be great, maybe even wonderful, that’s all. She wouldn’t have it any other way. Her brother needed wonderful, and right this minute, so did she.
* * *
Upstairs Sis washed the dirt off and changed into fresh slacks and a clean black T-shirt, but there was nothing she could do to erase the awful way Emily had looked during her phone conversation with Larry. He’d crushed her with the ease and carelessness of someone smashing a butterfly.
She thought about knocking on Jim’s door and relating the incident to him, but he might be getting dressed, and besides, he was too hurt from his own wounds to be burdened with Sis’s dark opinions.
She headed back downstairs to warn Sweet Mama and Beulah. They were both in rocking chairs on the porch, swaying gently to the ebb and flow of their conversation. Sis stood in the doorway a moment, the rhythm of their words running through her like a beloved song. No matter what was going on in the world around her, Sis could hear their voices and feel herself being tethered to this place she called home. She allowed herself the luxury of soaking up that comfort a moment longer, and then she pushed away and marched across the wooden porch.
“Guess who’s coming to dinner?” she said.
“If you fixing to tell me you bringing Sidney Poitier, I’m gonna get all gussied up.” Beulah chuckled, and after a heartbreaking lag, Sweet Mama joined her.
They both loved Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. When it had first come out two years ago, they’d planned the theater outing as if they were going on an overnight trip to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
“I hate to disappoint you, Beulah. It’s not Sidney. It’s Larry Chastain.”
“Who?” Sweet Mama said, and Sis leaned down to put a hand on her shoulder.
“Emily’s fiancé. Remember?”
“Of course I do. What do you think I am? Senile?” Sweet Mama eased out of her rocker, one blue-veined hand clutching the armrest to steady herself. “Come on, Beulah. If company’s coming, we’re eating in the dining room and using the good silver.”
“I ain’t sure that man’s worth no good silver, Lucy.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Ain’t you always the judge?” Beulah winked at Sis, then took a hold of Sweet Mama’s arm and led her back into the house. Sis would have followed them, but she knew they’d shoo her out of the way. She was useless around crockery and cutlery. She always ended up breaking or spilling something, and in general making a big mess that had to be cleaned up. She knew her place, and it certainly wasn’t in the kitchen.
She leaned against a porch column and shaded her eyes, looking for signs of her future brother-in-law. She wanted to be the first to see him, to talk to him before Emily came out all flushed, trying to act as if Larry hadn’t already spoiled her evening.
Sis flicked a speck of dust off the front of her shirt, harder than necessary, so hard in fact, that she ended up feeling the sting of her own slap.
His car came upon her suddenly, turning into the driveway before she had decided what she was going to say to him. Let him off the hook completely? Pretend she didn’t know he’d acted an ass about dinner? Emily would be pleased if she kept quiet, but Sis might just choke on her own bile.
“Sis! Don’t you look a vision?” Larry strode up the front steps with the confidence of a smooth-talking, handsome man used to turning heads. Before she knew what was happening, he was bent over her hand, kissing it, and she found herself staring at the too-straight part slicing through his black hair.
“A nightmare is more like it,” she said.
Larry didn’t respond to her self-deprecating comment. Instead, he let go of her hand, thank God, and looked out over the Gulf.
“You have a beautiful view. No wonder Emily loves this place.”
“She does, but then Emily loves almost everything and everybody.”
“Lucky me. I finally found a woman who could look beyond my flaws and see a hero.”
“Emily’s a sweet, trusting woman, Larry. And easily hurt.”
“She’s the woman of every man’s dreams.”
“Yes, she is. I’m glad you know how lucky you are to have her.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it.” Suddenly, Larry puffed up with such self-importance Sis thought he’d levitate right off the front porch. “A salesman learns to read people. When I saw your sister, I read her like a book.”
“And what did that book say?” If he noticed her sarcasm, he didn’t show a sign.
“‘I’m a woman you can keep barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.’”
He laughed at his own Dark Ages attitude, and Sis wanted to slap him off the porch. Emily saved him, rushing out pink-faced and smiling, the only sign of her nervousness showing in the way she wadded a corner of her blue gingham apron into a tight fist.
“Larry! I’m so glad you’re here.” She rushed over to hug him, and he winked over her shoulder at Sis.
Did that jackass dare to think they were coconspirators? Or was he so certain of his hold over her sister that he didn’t care how he flaunted his power?
Still steaming, she watched Larry lead her sister into the house. She had to stand on the porch deep breathing before she could follow. The evening couldn’t be over fast enough to suit Sis.
Five (#ulink_3b57d4e1-03bb-57a0-b7df-3f794f4aace3)
THE DINING ROOM TABLE looked elegant with Sweet Mama’s china and silver gleaming in the candlelight. The candles had been Emily’s idea, a last-minute addition to make Larry feel special. She couldn’t help but take pride that dinner was turning out to be a great success.
Sis was playing hostess with such grace, Emily would never have guessed she’d pitched a hissy fit in the kitchen earlier. Sweet Mama and Beulah wore rhinestone brooches for the occasion, and Andy looked darling with his face scrubbed clean and his flyaway hair slicked back. It looked suspiciously shiny to Emily. Later, she’d have to find out what he used. Usually it was water, but his cowlick was too tame for that.
Even Jim had joined them. Emily was glad, though he hadn’t said a single word except hello.
Fortunately, Larry didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy fielding questions from Sweet Mama and Beulah.
“What brought you down here?” Sweet Mama said, and Larry acted as if she hadn’t already asked him the same question three times. Emily hoped Sis noticed.
“I applied for a transfer to this area because I love fishing.”
“It’s his favorite pastime,” Emily added, hoping Sweet Mama would remember a granddaughter better than she did a virtual stranger.
“Before I met our girl here, I spent all my time with a fishing pole in my hands.”
“Jim has a fishing boat and a convertible.” Emily glanced at her brother, hopeful, but he was moving his mashed potatoes around on his plate. “It would be great if the two of you would let the top down and go fishing together.”
When Jim’s hand tightened over his fork, Emily had the awful feeling that she was pushing her brother back instead of drawing him close. To make matters worse, Beulah scowled at her and Andy started kicking the table leg.
“Fish ain’t biting now or me and Jim would’a gone today.” Beulah closed her hand around Jim’s arm, and there it stayed, dark as sorghum molasses against his white shirt. “Ain’t no telling when they gonna bite again.”
Sis shot Emily a warning glance, but it was already too late to stop a conversation rolling toward disaster.
“Fish always bite for me.” Larry turned his attention to Jim, looking pointedly at the crutch leaning against his chair. “How about it, Jim? Go fishing with me and I’ll do all the driving. Thank God I avoided this senseless war and stayed in one piece.”
“Our boy drives just fine.” Beulah looked like a thundercloud that didn’t care who she rained on.
“Jim’s a hero.” Sweet Mama peered at Larry. “All the men in our family are heroes.”
“How come you didn’t go to war?” Beulah asked.
“I didn’t pass the draft. I was 4F.”
Larry’s face tightened and Emily wadded her napkin into a little ball. Did her future husband have some dire medical condition she didn’t know about?
“Why were you 4F, darling?”
“Flat feet,” he said.
Emily wanted to crawl under the table. Her daddy’s World War II medals were on prominent display in a shadow box in the entry hall and Jim’s Purple Heart would soon be there, as well.
Sweet Mama laid down her fork in that big, clattering way she had when she meant business.
“There’s nothing but patriotic men in this family,” she said, “and we’re proud of it.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Beulah patted Jim’s arm. “In my day, we called them 4F-ers slackers.”
Larry’s face blazed and Emily’s felt hot. She’d explain to Larry later that Sweet Mama was slowly losing touch with reality, that Beulah would say just about anything if she thought one of her babies was under fire, but how would she explain to her family that she was going to marry a man they considered a coward?
And still, there was the rest of this awful evening to get through. She shot a desperate glance at Sis.
“We’re going to take dessert on the front porch,” Sis announced.
“Make sure it’s the good china.” Sweet Mama picked up her fork and smiled at Larry as if the conversation about heroes and slackers had never taken place. “I always serve company on china plates.”
Emily didn’t know what to do except sit there with her hand on Larry’s arm in the desperate hope that one small touch from the woman he loved would calm him down while Sis helped Sweet Mama from the table. Andy was already racing toward the front porch and, from the looks of things, Beulah and Jim were heading upstairs. She hoped so. She didn’t know how she could get through the rest of the evening if Beulah kept acting like a bear protecting her cub.
And poor Jim. She couldn’t endure thinking about him right now. If an intimate family dinner could render him speechless and wrecked, what would a public outing do?
When the dining room was clear of everybody except the two of them, she turned to Larry.
“I’m sorry, darling.”
“Let’s just eat dessert and get out of here,” he said. “I knew it would turn out this way.”
“Beulah and Sweet Mama didn’t mean any harm. Really. They’re just getting on in years and set in their ways.”
“Thank God I don’t have to contend with my family.”
Why not? Emily didn’t dare ask, not after Larry’s humiliation at the hands of her family.
“I’ll make it up to you later, Larry. I promise.”
She led him onto the front porch where Sweet Mama smiled up from her rocking chair, Andy looked like an angel and Sis served up Amen cobbler on china plates. The moon hung low over the water, casting silvery patches on the porch floor. It was the kind of clear summer night that made you think there was nothing bad in this world that couldn’t be fixed.
* * *
Late that night, Sis sat on the front porch in the dark alone, heavy with the feeling that something awful was happening to someone she loved. It couldn’t be Jim. He’d been in his room ever since he left the table tonight without dessert. But Sis doubted he was sleeping, and even if he were, his slumber was unlikely to be peaceful.
And it couldn’t be Sweet Mama or Beulah. She’d checked before she came onto the porch. If they were bothered about goading Larry because he’d shirked his military duty, you couldn’t tell by the way they rested on their backs with their snores rattling the windowpanes. Had their bluntness been deliberate or was it old age? Didn’t they know if you prodded a coiled snake it would strike back?
Sis jumped up from the swing, her sister suddenly so strongly on her mind she wanted to race inside and call her. Sis walked to a patch of moonlight on the porch and peered at her watch. It was after midnight, far too late to call Emily and say, Are you okay? Did Larry punish you for what happened at dinner? Sis had no doubt he would. A man who would reduce his fiancée to tears over a dinner invitation would use any excuse to exert his power over her.
Or would he do worse?
Sis paced the porch until she was so tired she thought she’d fall over. Easing through the front door, she tiptoed upstairs, got into pajamas and fell into bed. But her sleep was restless, broken by nightmares and the helpless feeling of being chased and unable to run.
When the morning light pinked her windowpanes, she sat up in bed with a headache so fierce she didn’t know how she’d begin her daily routine, much less get through it with a shred of compassion. Just this once she wished she could wake up in bed with a good man who would say, Honey, you rest. I’ll take care of everything.
She eased out of bed, tiptoed to the bathroom, then downed two aspirins and waited. When the jackhammers in her head subsided, she went back into her bedroom and picked up the phone. Emily answered on the first ring.
“Em, you sound funny. Are you all right?”
“Just a little tired is all, Sis. Too much excitement.”
“I’m sorry about the way dinner turned out. Was Larry mad?”
“He was a little upset, that’s all. What man wouldn’t be? But after I talked to him, he was fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Sis. Let it alone. Andy’s downstairs dragging out more boxes and I’ve got to get to the café to put together an order list. I’m going to need more supplies for the wedding petit fours.”
Sis hung up, still hoping there wouldn’t be a wedding. But she had the sinking feeling that she was riding on a train that had already left the station. It didn’t matter how hard she yelled, Stop! Let’s all get off. They were going to end up listening to Emily pledge Till death do us part to a man they all considered a coward.
The aroma of coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen told Sis she’d better get moving. She dressed quickly, then went to Jim’s room and knocked.
“Come in.” He was sitting at his window wearing the white dress shirt she didn’t know if he’d slept in or worn during an all-night vigil with the moon or put on again this morning.
An unbearable tenderness came over Sis, and she sank into the only other chair in the room, the one at his desk where the encyclopedia was open at C for compass. Or was it compassion? Did the encyclopedia tell you that compassion was not something you searched for, but a feeling you carried in your heart whether you knew it or not, one so powerful it could render you speechless?
Sis studied the slump of her brother’s shoulders, the blond hair grown too long and straggling down the back of his neck, the hollow in his cheek as he tilted his head toward the view beyond the window.
“I thought you might want to go down to breakfast with me.”
“Yeah, Sis. The family dinner went so well.”
The flash of sarcasm gave Sis hope that the Jim of old was somewhere inside those baggy clothes.
“Did you see the look on his face when Beulah talked about 4F-ers?” she said.
“It would have been funny if Em weren’t fixing to marry him.”
“Well, she is, and there’s not a thing either of us can do about it except carry on.”
“You carry on, Sis.” He turned his back to her and stared out the window.
Sis sat there awhile, undecided, and then she went downstairs to brace herself with a cup of coffee. A day that had started off so badly was bound to get worse.
The scene in the kitchen stopped her cold. Sweet Mama was sitting at the kitchen table with her hat on. It wasn’t a garden hat, which might have made sense if she’d been working outside and just forgot to take it off. It was a wide-brimmed white Panama with a virtual flower garden on the brim, red and pink peonies the size of saucers with a big blue feather spouting out from the bouquet.
Beulah looked up from the coffeepot and lowered a look at Sis that said Don’t you say a word.
Sis hurried to the cabinet and turned her back to hide her dismay. She took her time selecting a mug from the array that had collected over the years. She selected one with Alabama the Beautiful from a long-ago trip to Natural Bridge. Then she stood there just holding on, wishing the grandmother wearing the flower garden hat was still the same strong woman who had loaded Beulah and her grandchildren into the car for a three-hundred-mile trip in spite of the fact that she’d had to fight for Beulah every step of the way.
When Sis had regained composure, she went to the pot and poured her coffee.
“We having a garden party in here.” Beulah smiled at her. “Where’s your hat?”
Sis grabbed her garden hat off the peg by the back door and sat down to have breakfast. Carrying on.
Still, wearing a hat at a battered old table for a nonexistent garden party would be mild compared to the facade she’d have to wear once she got to the café. How she would ever get through the petit fours and the cheese balls, not to mention the wedding madness that had overtaken the regulars, Sis didn’t know.
Sometimes she wished she could hole up in her room like her brother while Beulah trekked up the stairs with sweet tea and sympathy.
Six (#ulink_adf1ac93-63b6-5871-94c8-e6a207514233)
EMILY DIDN’T KNOW WHAT was wrong with Sis. Ever since their talk about having her wedding in the garden, she’d been snappish and forgetful. It had gotten worse since that awful dinner with Larry, and that was more than a week ago.
Yesterday Sis forgot to order coffee with chicory, and she still hadn’t brought those polka-dot sunglasses she’d promised Andy last week.
Still, nothing could mar Emily’s happiness. The cheese balls for her reception were in the refrigerator, the petit fours decorated with pink icing were rapidly piling up in the chest freezer in the pantry and she was going to do one last campout with her son before the wedding.
Standing in the backyard of Sweet Mama’s Café, enjoying a cup of coffee before the breakfast crowd started getting too big for Sweet Mama to handle, Emily kicked off her shoes and smiled as Andy raced around the ship, his untamable hair flying every which way. She made a note to add a trip to the barber to her list of things to do before the wedding.
“Can we camp out here tonight?”
“No. We’re going to camp out at Sweet Mama’s house.”
“Can we take the rocket ship?”
“We’re going to sleep in a tent.”
“Why can’t we sleep in the rocket?”
“Because then there wouldn’t be enough room for Aunt Sis. You want her to join the campout, don’t you?”
“I can sleep on the roof. See?” Andy clambered on top and stretched out. When his feet hung over the side, he curled up in a little ball. “Just right,” he yelled.
“That’s not a good idea, Andy.”
“How come?”
Ordinarily, Emily reveled in these meandering conversations with Andy, but lately he’d been trying her patience. Deliberately, it seemed. Was it because he didn’t want to share her with Larry or was there some deeper motive?
It was a relief when her neighbors Tom and James Wilson came through the back door of the café. Still bachelors at fifty and some said set in their ways, they were nonetheless two of the sweetest guys Emily had ever met. Tom was carrying a toolbox and James was wagging a little stack of lumber.
“We’ve been seeing you and Andy toting stuff out of your house for his little project out here,” Tom said. “Hope you don’t mind some help.”
“Of course not!” Emily hugged them both and they got pink in the face.
Soon the sound of hammering blended with Andy’s laughter as they shored up the cardboard boxes with scrap lumber. Tom looked like a rumpled, friendly elf with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his white hair sticking out from an old fishing hat with the lures still attached to the band. James was just the opposite. Tall, reserved and elegant, even with a hammer in his hand, he was dressed in a summer suit of blue pin-striped seersucker.
“That ought to do it,” Tom said, pushing back his fishing hat and reaching over to ruffle Andy’s hair. “Now that little rocket ship is sound as a dollar, even if it rains.”
Emily hoped the little ship didn’t have to be put to the test. She was still planning on a garden wedding, in spite of Sis’s long lip. As much as the new rose hedge would benefit from a shower, she didn’t want anything to ruin her wedding.
“It just needs this one last thing.” James bent over his toolbox and pulled out a wooden box with a little red steering wheel attached. It was covered with dials that looked as if they’d come from old car parts. Inside he’d rigged a set of hair clippers that buzzed when Andy turned one of the dials.
Being part of her little boy’s quest for the moon might be the biggest event in their lives. Neither Tom nor James had ever been married, and they both still lived with an ancient cat and their even more ancient mother, who had taken to her bed when she was fifty for reasons nobody knew or would tell.
Emily teared up, but she didn’t know if she was crying because Andy didn’t like Larry, or because the Wilson brothers had to find joy in a little rocket ship made from cardboard boxes, or because her own sister could end up exactly like them, with nothing to show for her years except gray hair and an old cat.
As they loaded up their tools, Emily said, “I’m going to give you an Amen cobbler to take home. Your mother might enjoy it.”
“Mother eats like a bird,” Tom said, “but she’s still partial to Sweet Mama’s cooking.”
“Good, then. That’s settled.”
They trudged back to the café, turning in the doorway to wave just as Burt Larson came out.
“I had some old sheets of plastic up at the house,” Burt said. “I thought I’d help out with that little rocket ship, if you don’t mind.”
Andy squealed and hugged the postman around the legs. Emily wished he’d show half that much enthusiasm with the man who was going to be his daddy.
She thanked Burt and then left him in the backyard, helping Andy with the rocket ship while she hurried back to the café. A cloud of sugar and spice rose from the cobblers Sweet Mama had lined up on the counter.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a big bowl of cobbler for dessert worked its magic on Andy? Wouldn’t it be great if the steam that rose around him softened her son so that viewing Larry as his daddy would be as simple as a hug?
They’d eat it tonight in Sweet Mama’s backyard, while the moon was high and the stars looked like a blanket of lights thrown across the sky. She was smiling as she got a big bowl to serve up Andy’s surprise cobbler, and a length of tinfoil to cover it.
Emily dug through the flaky crust and into a mixture of peaches and cherries so deep she could see her future. The sweetness of love long denied wafted around her, and the joy of having a real family of her own.
But as she dipped toward the bottom, she felt an overwhelming sadness, as if something waited for her in the dark with fangs bared.
“Oh, I’m just being silly.” She quickly covered Andy’s bowl, then wrapped cobbler for Tom and James.
“What was that, dear?”
Miss Opal Clemson was standing behind Emily, a little blue hat perched on her gray hair, a black patent-leather purse tucked over her arm and a wide smile on her face. Emily made a mental note to pay her a visit. Miss Opal lived just around the corner from her, and she thought how lonely it must be to rattle around in a house all by yourself.
“My goodness. Miss Opal.” She smiled at the petite piano teacher who had tried her best to teach Emily the mysteries of the keyboard. It hadn’t worked. Emily didn’t have a musical bone in her body.
“I was thinking about your wedding music, dear. Have you thought about using a recording of ‘Clair de Lune’?”
Burt Larson, just coming from the backyard, chimed in with, “Seems to me like Emily’s Big Event ought to have music plain folks can understand.”
The regulars at the next table joined in, and soon the entire café was abuzz with plans for Emily’s Big Event, spoken as if each word were capitalized and ought to be posted out by the Gulf on the huge billboard that advertised Baricev’s Seafood Harbor.
As the customers continued to offer unsolicited advice about the wedding, Emily saw Sis materialize in the doorway of her office, then turn and walk back inside.
Excusing herself from Miss Opal, Emily handed Tom an Amen cobbler then stowed Andy’s in the kitchen and hurried after her sister.
She found her seated at a battered oak desk glancing at the clock as if she could cling to the march of time and soothe herself with the thought that two o’clock would eventually come and she could close up Sweet Mama’s.
As Emily sat in the other chair, an uncomfortable old thing with a slatted back and a cane bottom losing some of its canes, she was certain Sis chose it deliberately to discourage visits.
“How was Jim this morning?” Emily asked.
“The same. Hunkered down in the house like he’s in a foxhole.”
“Maybe my wedding will be just the thing to bring him around.”
“I wouldn’t hold out any high hopes, Em.”
Sis always looked on the gloomy side of life. Emily refused to let it sag her spirit.
“Did you bring those special astronaut glasses for Andy?”
“I forgot. Sorry, Em.”
Good grief! Forgetting was so unlike her sister, Emily wondered if Sis was getting a brain tumor.
“Just give them to him tonight at the campout, will you? He’s worrying me to death over those glasses.”
“I don’t know that camping out in the backyard is such a good idea.”
“Why not? We always camp out in Sweet Mama’s backyard.”
“It’s too hot to camp out.”
“It’s never too hot for a six-year-old. Besides, it’ll be fun. We can pitch the tent by the new hedge so we can smell the roses.”
“Not the rose hedge!”
“Good grief, Sis. What’s the matter with you?”
Sis just clamped her mouth shut and refused to say another word, which was fine with Emily. She had too much on her mind to continue this silly argument with her sister. If she didn’t hurry back to that growing café crowd, there was no telling what kind of mess Sweet Mama would make. She seemed to be having one of her good days, thank goodness, because Beulah had stayed home again to be with Jim, who seemed to be going backward instead of forward.
Still, something had to be done to help Sweet Mama, but Emily didn’t know what. After the wedding she’d ask Sis. But not until her sister got in a better mood.
“I’ve got to get back in there,” Emily said. “You didn’t forget that we’re looking at dresses for the wedding this afternoon, did you?”
Sis rolled her eyes and looked as if she’d been asked to stand before a firing squad. But Emily refused to be daunted, even when her sister glanced at the clock again as if it had suddenly become her enemy.
“How could I forget, Emily?”
“Good, then. We’ll leave at two.”
Emily could hardly contain her excitement. They’d drop Andy off to stay with Beulah, and then Emily could enter that sacred territory she’d fantasized about ever since she met Mark Jones—the bridal shop.
As she stepped back through the office door, she drew the sound of laughter and lazy chatter around her like a beloved shawl. But the Amen cobblers gave off such a scent of sorrow she wanted to weep.
Quickly she skirted around them, wishing it was already two o’clock.
* * *
The clock on the wall had become Sweet Mama’s enemy. Every loud ticktock meant she was roaring closer to the edge of a looming precipice. Sis was saying, “Sweet Mama, are you sure you can lock up?” and she didn’t have the faintest idea what this fierce granddaughter of hers wanted her to put under lock and key.
“Of course,” she said. “Go on and have fun. But don’t pick out a blue dress for me. If you do, I won’t wear it.”
She’d been wearing blue on the four worst days of her life—the day in 1920 that jackass came home drunk and all hell broke loose, the day horrible Ethel Williams sank her claws into Sweet Mama’s son Steve and dragged him to the altar, the Christmas her son Bill and his wife, Margaret, had died in a car crash and the day one year later when she’d stood in the doorway of her café and faced down the KKK with her double-barreled shotgun.
She was standing now in the café on a hot July day in 1969, waving cheerfully at her two departing granddaughters and her great-grandson, but she had the eerie sense of standing smack-dab in the middle of a brisk winter day in the forties with the double barrels of her shotgun pointed at a ragtag group of cowards. She could almost hear their voices, almost see the white hoods.
Through the echo of time, she heard the bell over the café door ringing. Sweet Mama came back to herself in time to see her granddaughters departing. Now, what was it they’d told her to do?
She sifted through a mind that felt like a sieve. Her memories were leaking through the holes so fast sometimes Sweet Mama felt as if she’d wake up one morning and see her past scattered around her on the floor.
Something kept nagging at her, something she ought to remember. Suddenly, it came to her, and she hurried to the kitchen to get the notepad she kept in her voluminous purse.
Sinking into a cane-bottomed chair that Beulah used when she was peeling potatoes, Sweet Mama thumbed through the pages. One was titled “Customers.” Tom and James Wilson were there along with Opal Clemson, the music teacher and Burt Larson, the mailman—every one of them described right down to the roots of their hair.
Sweet Mama found herself shaking again, an old woman with a rapidly fading memory depending on a notebook to keep her straight and wondering how much longer she’d be able to hang on to her secret and fool her granddaughters.
Beulah was another story. Nobody could fool her. When Sweet Mama had first started forgetting things she’d said, Beulah, my mind’s going and you’ve got to help me.
Beulah didn’t ask any questions. That was her way. She just folded Sweet Mama in one of her wide hugs and whispered, I ain’t about to let Mr. Steve and that uppity Miss Ethel put you in a nursing home.
That’s when the Remembering Book had been born. The only trouble was, she often couldn’t get to it in time to bail herself out of public embarrassments. More and more, she had to throw up smoke screens or pretend she was just kidding.
The clock in the café chimed three, and Sweet Mama knew she was already an hour late leaving. If she didn’t get a move on, she wouldn’t make it home before Sis and Emily got back from their shopping trip. Emily would worry and Sis was liable to call for a search party.
She scanned through her book till she found a page titled “Locking Up.” It told how to turn the open sign to Closed, how to find the key to the café on a peg in the pantry, and how to put it in the top zippered pocket of her purse after she’d gone out and locked the front door behind her.
Sweet Mama read the entry twice before she got up enough courage to execute it. Then she gathered her hat and her purse and stood awhile, trying to think if she was forgetting something.
Finally, she ended up at the front door where the key seemed to have outgrown the lock. It took her five minutes to discover she was holding it upside down.
By the time she got to her Buick, she had sweat patches under her arms and a bead of perspiration lining her upper lip. Thank God the key she put in the ignition caused the car to roar to life. Sweet Mama drove out of the parking lot as smooth as if it were 1921 and she was driving her Tin Lizzie, heading to her brand-new bakery with Beulah at her side.
With the windows down, the Gulf breeze got under the brim of her black straw hat, making her feel twenty-seven again and ready to show the Jazz Age that a young divorcée with two little boys could start a business the same as a man, only ten times better if it’s a bakery.
She started to sing, but was shocked at the thin, reedy voice she heard. She and Beulah used to ride along in that Tin Lizzie, singing in harmony as good as the Boswell Sisters, Sweet Mama belting out the alto and Beulah adding her soaring soprano.
Determined not to be depressed on such a beautiful day, Sweet Mama glanced toward the beach. Terns called from sandy knolls and seagulls wheeled over the Gulf and everything was exactly where it ought to be. Sweet Mama didn’t know why Sis worried so much about her driving. She’d lived in Biloxi all her life and knew it from one side to the other.
The usual souvenir shops lined the highway, eventually giving way to a row of waterfront houses. Her own pink Victorian house would be coming up any minute now.
The bridge loomed in front of her, and she eased off the accelerator. Sweet Mama didn’t believe in crossing bridges at full speed. It was a sure way to cause an accident. As much as she enjoyed looking out over the water, she kept her eyes straight ahead till she was over the bridge and cruising down the highway where long-legged storks lifted toward the tops of cypress trees sprouting out of the shallows.
Always a lover of nature, she admired the sight while the Buick hummed along the highway.
Was that the sun already sinking over the water? Where was her street? Where was her house?
Panicked, Sweet Mama eased her Buick into a side road that looked like it didn’t lead anywhere, let alone her house where Beulah would be waiting with a glass of sweet tea. She stumbled out of her car and held on to her hat, searching her surroundings.
It seemed to her the sun was sinking in the east.
Then it occurred to her that she’d been driving along in exactly the opposite and wrong direction.
Frantically, she grabbed her purse out of the car and dug out the Remembering Book. But it was already too dark to read driving directions from the café to her house, and there was nothing written about a bridge to the unknown.
She was lost. And no matter how hard she searched the little notebook in her hand, it wouldn’t tell her how to find the way home.
Seven (#ulink_8da69715-2f85-5ad1-8478-cb06eddaf1e6)
DRIVING TO THE BRIDAL SHOP Sis felt as if she were in two places at once, behind the wheel of the car where she was borne along in a rushing torrent of Emily’s chatter and on the beach with the crowd of little boys playing a game of baseball.
“There’s no use counting on flowers from that new rose hedge,” Emily said.
Sis refused to think about the rose hedge till after the wedding. Even when she was in the garden, she skirted around the roses.
“Nothing’s surviving the heat except the oleander and the day lilies,” Emily added. “White oleander will be fine, but maybe I can use some baskets of pink roses to camouflage all that orange.”
His baseball cap was orange, that little boy on the beach who lobbed the ball toward center field and then spewed up a fine storm of sand as he slid into first base. He looked about ten, the age Sis’s son might be...if she had one. If she had a house and a husband and a dog in the backyard. She’d have a large breed, a golden retriever, maybe, or even a Border collie. Her son would call him Boy and play fetch with him in the backyard using a small baseball mitt to match the one she’d used when she was a child.
Her fantasy became part of Emily’s enthusiastic monologue.
“I thought for the music, we’d just move Sweet Mama’s turntable to the back porch and put on a record.”
The little boy in the orange cap was stealing into home. If she’d had a son, he would have done exactly that. He might even have grown up to be a professional baseball player.
“Sis, are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening.”
“I was going to use Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ but Larry doesn’t like that song.”
Just the mention of that fool’s name had Sis tightening her grip on the wheel.
“Emily, if you want to use that song, use it.”
“After what happened to her, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“Good grief!”
Judy Garland had died last month of a drug overdose. The famous singer’s death had made no impact at all on Sis. Music was just something to fill the days that seemed to go on forever. When had she realized she’d never marry, never have children of her own? When had the door slammed shut to a future that included a man with dark eyes and gentle hands who would hold her close and whisper her real name?
She could almost hear his voice. Beth, Beth, Beth.
“Sis!” Emily grabbed ahold of the dashboard. “Slow down.”
“Why? I’m not five miles over the speed limit.”
“You’re going to whiz right past the bridal shop.”
If Sis had her way, she’d fly past. She’d sprout wings so strong they would carry her and her sister far above the shop with pink-striped awnings where fairy tales were wrapped in pearls and lace and sold to gullible women who expected life to be one big happily ever after.
Wondering if she was being cantankerous or practical or just plain jealous, she parked under the spreading branches of an ancient magnolia tree so huge it shaded three spaces. The only good thing she could say about this shopping trip was that she didn’t have to lock the car. Thank God Biloxi was still that kind of town.
Sis followed her sister into a shop that smelled like ripe pears. Little sachets of the potpourri were piled high in crystal bowls along the glass countertop.
A set of full-length mirrors along the east wall showed her sister, multiplied, surrounded by wedding dresses in an endless sea of white.
When the heart breaks it makes a sound so small there is nothing to show for it except a hand clutched over the chest and a sudden smothering sensation. Was it breaking for Emily or herself, a homely woman who would never catch a husband, let alone have a little boy stealing into home plate?
Feeling guilty and remorseful for her unbecoming jealousy of a sister she loved more than all the would-be suitors in Biloxi, Sis followed Emily into an area of curtained dressing rooms where her sister insisted she try on a bridesmaid’s dress. Pink, for God’s sake. Even worse, it had ruffles.
The mirror confirmed that Sis looked as bad as she’d imagined.
“I look like a linebacker dipped in Pepto-Bismol.”
“Hush up. It brings out some color in your face.” Emily walked around her, admiring the awful dress from every angle. “With some pearls and a touch of lipstick, you’ll be sensational.”
Sis had never been sensational in her life. She didn’t know how she was going to start now, with or without lipstick. She didn’t ask what color. She didn’t even want to know.
“Fine.” She couldn’t get out of the dress fast enough. What did it matter how she looked as long as her sister was finally going to get the wedding of her dreams? “You’re the one who ought to be trying on dresses.”
Emily rifled through the rack and held up a floor-length satin dress.
“I like this one. It’s the perfect dress for the perfect wedding.”
Sis wished she could believe that. But since she’d gotten a glimpse of Larry’s true nature, she felt like they were all in the middle of one of the hurricanes that sometimes swept through the Gulf Coast, blowing away everything in its path.
“The dress is lovely, Em. I’ll help get you zipped in.”
“No, no. I can do it by myself.”
Emily clutched the dress to her chest, and for an instant, she wouldn’t even look at Sis. Emily had ocean eyes, a blue so deep it could hold the endless moods of the sea, every one of them reflected in a glance. What was she trying to hide?
“I’m fine, Sis. You wait out here.”
She sank into an overstuffed chair covered in hideous-looking pink chintz wondering what that skunk had said or done to her sister now. Since that awful dinner, Emily hadn’t brought him back to Sweet Mama’s, and he certainly hadn’t shown his slick face in the café. Even worse, Emily, who told her everything, had told her nothing of any importance since that night.
By the time her sister reappeared, Sis was biting her nails down to the quick.
“What do you think, Sis?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I think it has too many sequins on the bodice.” Emily twisted this way and that in front of the mirror, viewing the dress from all angles.
“Okay. I’ll help you get out of it and you can try on another one.”
“No. You wait here. I want to surprise you.”
Emily selected three more dresses off the racks and disappeared once more into the dressing room while Sis sat there wondering what was taking so long and what in the world was wrong with sequins.
“What about this one?” Emily was in a getup with long, satin sleeves and a tight bodice.
“Can you breathe in that thing?”
“You think it’s too tight?”
“No, I just think you ought to be comfortable at your own wedding.” Emily’s face fell. Had Sis hit a nerve? “But what do I know?”
“I have two more I want to try.”
If the dresses had those silly little buttons in the back like the one she was wearing they’d be there till Judgment Day. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, considering who would be waiting for her sister at the altar.
“Hey, Em,” she called. “Before the wedding, why don’t I take you and Andy somewhere?” Maybe if Emily had some time away from Larry, she’d come to her senses. “Maybe up the Peabody in Memphis so Andy can see the ducks?”
“We’re going camping in the backyard tonight. That’s enough.”
Sis sighed. It was bad enough to keep fighting a battle she couldn’t win. Sitting still for so long in a shop filled with things as breakable as her sister made the situation even worse.
“Need any help in there, Em?”
“No. I’m not even going to zip this one. It’s too pink.”
“I thought you wanted pink.”
“Not this pink. I just don’t want white, that’s all. It doesn’t seem appropriate.”
Emily’s sensitivity to her so-called scarlet past made Sis want to smack somebody. Just about anybody would do.
In a whisper of blush-colored silk that looked like the underside of a camellia, Emily emerged from the dressing room and stood in front of Sis with her yellow hair glowing under the lights and her mouth turned into a shy smile.
“How do I look?”
Beautiful and breathtaking—even happy—were the words that would come to mind if you didn’t know Emily. But Sis had seen how Emily beamed every time she glanced in the direction of her son. There was something amiss here, something as subtle as an undertow in the Gulf you wouldn’t notice until it had swept you out to sea.
Sis looked beyond the swirling skirts, beyond the bodice beaded with seed pearls, beyond the tiny, long-sleeved lace bolero that covered Emily’s arms and shoulders. And that’s when she saw it, the darkening skin of her upper arm.
She leaped up and grabbed her sister’s arm, leaned close for a better look. It was definitely a bruise. Sis had the sensation of looking into a chasm, one so deep and wide it would swallow them all.
“Em, what is this?”
“It’s nothing.” Emily pulled her arm away, but Sis pushed her sister’s sleeve back until she had uncovered the mottled discoloration of a fading bruise.
“How’d you get this?”
When Emily didn’t want to answer a hard question, she got so still you could pass right by and hardly notice her standing there.
“You know I won’t stop till I find out, Em.”
“It was an accident, Sis. Really. For Pete’s sake.” Emily pulled away and pushed her sleeve over the bruise. “I was going down the stairs too fast and fell against the banister. You know how easily I bruise.”
Emily was lying. Sis could tell by the way her sister wouldn’t look into her eyes.
If rage were a country, Sis would be China. This was her baby sister, the one Sis had loved and fought for, even to the point of cornering the Bible school teacher at Biloxi Baptist Church and threatening to beat the snot out of her if she didn’t put a star on Emily’s chart.
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Elaine Hussey
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: An emotionally riveting tale of the bonds of family and the power of hope in the sultry Deep South.In 1969, the first footsteps on the moon brighten America with possibilities. But along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a category five storm is brewing, and the Blake sisters of Biloxi are restless for change. Beth ‘Sis′ Blake has always been the caretaker, the dutiful one, with the weight of her family’s happiness—and their secrets—on her shoulders. She dreams of taking off to pursue her own destiny, but not before doing whatever it takes to rescue her sister.Emily Blake, an unwed mother trying to live down her past, wants the security of marriage for the sake of her five-year-old son, Andy. But secure is the last thing she feels with her new husband. Now she must put aside pride and trust family to help her find the courage to escape.With Hurricane Camille stirring up havoc, two sisters—each desperate to break free—begin a remarkable journey, where they’ll discover that in the wake of destruction lies new life, unshakable strength and the chance to begin again. Dreams are rebornand the unforgettable force of friendship is revealed in The Oleander Sisters, an extraordinary story of courage, love and sacrifice.Discover more at www.ElaineHussey.com