by Annie Jones
“Thank you, Daddy.” She touched his cheek, shut her eyes a moment and drew in the damp aroma of fresh pastry from the Not By Bread Alone Bakery. “But no. No, thank you.”
“But, sweetheart, I wonder…maybe there’s something I can do to help.”
She pulled her shoulders up, opened her eyes and forced a smile. “What will help right now is to get you out of here before Deborah pokes her nose out that door and offers to toss us both out on our you-know-whats.”
“Our ears?”
She looped her arm through his. “Somewhere decidedly south of our ears, Daddy.”
“Oh, then we’d better scoot.” He pushed the front door open. “If I hit that unforgiving pavement anywhere but my hard old head, I might just suffer an injury.”
“Then as often as folks threaten to toss you out of places, maybe you should invest in some iron-lined britches for protection.”
“Iron britches. Oh, I do like that notion. Imagine the epidemic of throbbing toes when I tell all them around town who say I need a swift kick in the pants, ‘Go right ahead and give it all you got!’”
The bright daylight made her squint and the picture of her father getting the last laugh on his critics made her wince.
“Now, that’s what I like to see.” He swiped his knuckle over her cheek. “You should smile more, honey, it really suits you.”
She didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth, so she obliged him with a nod, then pinched the fabric of his plaid sleeve between her thumb and forefinger. “Now, Daddy, please, ple-e-ase promise me you won’t get into more trouble today.”
“I’ll go you one better than that. How’s about you won’t hear a peep out of me for a good…oh, three or four days?”
“Why? What do you plan to get up to?”
“Get up to? Me?” His dentures made a soft whistling sound as he grinned and chuckled at the same time. “I can’t win for losing with you, girl. One minute you warn me to stay out of mischief for a while, and when I promise to do just that, you accuse me of ulterior motives.”
“Well?”
“Don’t you worry none. For the next few days you won’t even know I’m in town.”
She studied his expression for any hint of monkey business, but when her eyes met his, she saw there such love, such compassion, that she felt a twinge of guilt for having even considered doubting his good intentions.
She kissed his cheek and with a gentle shove sent her father off for his home in the section of Wileyville lined with tidy little tract houses built in the sixties that people still referred to as New Town. After that she inhaled deeply and held her breath. What to do now? Should she head back to her house, back to the soft old chair where she had intended to spend her day?
She chewed her lip and gazed at the pharmacy down the way.
…someone has to start—start talking the truth, start looking at things in a new light, start reaching out.
More than a few people considered her daddy a crackpot, but sometimes he did say some awfully wise things.
Her hard-earned, perfectly awful day had already gotten off track. Maybe…
Why not, Sadie-girl?
Why not, indeed. It wasn’t a big deal, no giant leap for lonely-wifekind, but somehow Sadie’s stride took on a whole new air of importance as she headed off to surprise her husband and maybe, just maybe, do as her daddy suggested—and start something!
Chapter Three
Sadie rapped on the huge glass window of the Royal Academy, then motioned for her best friend to meet her at the open door.
“Right foot step, feet together, pause. Heads high. Slowly, smoothly, glide, ladies, glide! No peeking at the ground and, remember, if you move too fast, you’re going to wobble!” Mary Tate demonstrated the modified waltz step all the way over to Sadie’s side, then slipped through the door, calling back, “Keep it up, maidens. Dogwood Blossom Queen gets crowned in five days, and I will not have my name associated with a bunch of peekers and wobblers.”
Sadie gave her friend a quick hug, jerking her head toward the goings-on behind them. “Processional practice?”
“What else?”
“Got started on it kind of late, didn’t you?”
Mary Tate blew a tuft of pale blond hair off her damp forehead with a puff from her cotton-candy-colored lips. “Bunch of the girls got the idea they didn’t need to practice walking this year.”
“What changed their minds?”
Mary Tate folded her arms and leaned back against the doorframe, smirking. “The shoes arrived.”
“Don’t even mention them.” Sadie rolled her eyes. “I still have nightmares about those vile things.”
The shoes—pointed-toe satin pumps that had gone out of style the same time as pillbox hats and bouffant hairdos—came ready to dye the exact color of each girl’s frothy pastel dress. They had 3¼ inch heels, because anything less would look downright dowdy, and anything higher…well, as Mrs. Cummins, the high school principal put it, “High heels and hoop skirts, can you imagine anything more common than that? We’re feting our girls here, not throwing some Hollywood version of a trashy yee-haw Dixie teenage wedding!”
Waynetta Cummins was Wileyville’s equivalent of Miss Manners. When she decreed something “too tacky to abide,” you could pretty much count that that dog didn’t hunt in any event over which she held sway around town. There existed, of course, one glaring exception to that rule.
“You’ll never believe this, but my daddy wants to walk with your troop in the Memorial Day parade.”
“Okay.”
Sadie blinked. “Easy as that?”
“Sure? Why not?”
There was that question again. “You aren’t mortified at the prospect of crazy Moonie Shelnutt walking along with your group?”
“Naw, I’ll just dress him up as something vaguely military and let him loose. Maybe I can round up a costume for Uncle Sam or General Lee. Or…if all else fails…Colonel Sanders.” She laughed. “The kids will love it.”
“Of course they will. All kids love Daddy. I think they recognize him as one of their own kind.”
“You’re too hard on the old man, sugar. Too hard on your sisters as well, but then why would you treat them any different than you do yourself?”
“Ha! The last thing I am is hard on myself. In fact, if anything, I totally overindulge my moods and bad habits, and you know it.” Sadie tugged at the side of her dress in hopes of making her figure look a little less like a saggy old sack of potatoes. “But at least I finally broke that hypercritical cycle with my own kids.”
“Sweetie, how many times do I have to point out that you can’t call what you have going on a cycle? You are not repeating the mistakes of parents. You couldn’t if you wanted to.”
Sadie gazed down the tree-lined street in the welcoming town where her father had raised her in the best way he knew how. The place she had also chosen to bring up her children to the best of her own ability.
“I’d describe this whole hard-on-yourself-versus-not-so-hard-on-your-kids deal more as a pendulum.” Mary Tate let her arm dangle limp from her raised elbow, then set it swaying in illustration. “And sending it swinging as far as possible in the opposite direction from your natural inclinations does not amount to the same thing as dealing with the problem.”
Mary Tate had sung a variation on that tune so many times these last few months that Sadie had no problem jumping right in with the well-worn refrain. “Yes, yes. Olivia’s seventeen. I don’t have a lot of time left to make sure that she’s prepared for the world beyond Wileyville. The clock is ticking, and so on and so on and so on.”
“The clock is ticking, Sadie, ticktock, ticktock. But you don’t seem the least bit inclined to hear it or to take a hard look at what’s going on around you.” Mary Tate paused and stared pointedly at a shiny red car with a white top that pulled up in front of the pharmacy.
Sadie glanced over her shoulder just long enough to see the poised and polished regional sales r
epresentative for a line of cosmetics Ed carried in the store.
“Ticktock, ticktock.” Stepping out to the side for a better vantage point, Mary Tate watched the sales rep’s clipped stride take her into the front of the building. When she turned to Sadie again, her eyes shone with concern, her usual smile set into a grim line. “Honey, listen to me, I know you feel bad right now, but you can’t go on letting the world pass you by.”
“Me? I thought the topic for today’s sermon was Olivia.”
Her friend shut her eyes and let out a long, weary breath. “Okay, you want to talk Olivia? Fine. How’s this? You can’t keep letting Olivia hold your entire household hostage to her whims.”
“She doesn’t hold the household hostage.” Just me. Sadie didn’t have the nerve to face her friend’s response to that kind of admission. So she focused her attention on the girls at practice through the large window and pretended to check out her reflection by ruffling her raggedy hairdo. “Olivia is a good kid who’s at that awkward age when she thinks she’s grown up and no one else does. She just runs hot and cold, that’s all.”
“She runs white-hot hissy fits and cold shoulders to manipulate you into letting her have her way.”
“The getting-your-own-way gene is strong in that girl, I have to admit.”
“She’s taking advantage, Sadie. And you let her do it because you’re scared to death that if you dare to yank her in line, she might not like you very much.”
Despite the caring touch of a hand on her arm, Sadie stiffened.
That did not dissuade Mary Tate, who only inched closer and lowered her voice to a raw, emotion-filled whisper. “And I know you, honey. If you thought anyone that you loved with all of your heart had stopped liking you, it would break your world in two.”
Tears sprang to Sadie’s eyes. She couldn’t help it. Since she’d lost the baby, she had cried too easily…and much, much too often.
“And right now you think your world is too fragile to take that kind of chance.” Mary Tate reached over and gave her a sideways hug. “But I’m telling you, for your daughter’s sake, you ought to risk it. She might not like you, but trust her enough to know she won’t stop loving you. Never, ever.”
Glib advice coming from the childless-by-choice contingent. Sadie thought it, but she didn’t even come close to voicing it. She loved this woman she’d befriended on the first day of junior-high gym class when Sadie couldn’t even make it around the track without Mary Tate’s encouragement and support. She would never say a thing to hurt her. Besides, Mary Tate had a valid point, and if Sadie weren’t such a dunderheaded fool, she’d admit it right now, right here, right out loud.
Instead, she folded her arms and sniffled, her chin high. “That all? You don’t want to tell me about how to do things differently with Ryan while you’re at it?”
“No, but if I were to say anything, it might contain a few choice words about Ed treating you more and more like a loyal workhorse and less and less like a loving helpmate. And I might ask how you hope to grow your son up into the kind of husband and father his future wife deserves with that as an example.”
“Ed doesn’t treat me like a workhorse.” Though she didn’t suppose she’d call herself his helpmate, either. “That’s just his way. After all, he’s only a—”
“I know. I know.” She shook her head. “A Yankee.”
“I was going to say he’s only a man.”
“Oh, yeah. One of those, too.” She rolled her big blue eyes. “You’re preaching to the choir on that one, sister.”
Sadie laughed. “Besides, Ed’s no more a Yankee than I am a bona fide southern belle.”
“Yeah, sure, I know. Not every woman born south of the Mason-Dixon is a belle.” She was repeating the admonition Mrs. Cummins used as the launching point for her infamous “God may separate the wheat from the chaff, but it’s manners that set the ladies apart from the riffraff” speech.
“Mrs. McCrackin?” a girl called above the clack of heels on the hardwood floors inside. “The music stopped. Should we keep walking in circles?”
Mary Tate shut her eyes and answered, “Why don’t you just keep walking?”
“What do we do for music?”
“Hum!”
Mary Tate paused to collect her thoughts. “No, we are not all born belles.” Mary Tate peered, squinty-eyed, over her shoulder at the young ladies tottering around her studio with all the grace of geese dancing on sawed-off stilts. “In fact, some of us are downright ding-a-lings.”
Whether she intended that jab at herself for taking on this project year after year, or the girls for refusing to concentrate and get it right, or even Mrs. Cummins for her steadfast embrace of the most awful shoes in existence, Sadie didn’t know.
“Ding-dong belles,” Mary Tate singsonged under her breath. Her head shaking, she turned to Sadie and shrugged. “Well, guess I’d better get back to chime school. So where are you off to this fine afternoon?”
“No place special. Just thought I’d pop in and surprise Ed.”
“Hold on a minute there.” Her friend banged the heel of her hand against her temple, her face scrunched up on one side. “Something’s wrong. I thought I just heard you use ‘Ed’ and ‘surprise’ in the same sentence.”
“Oh, ha-ha.” Sadie interrupted her phony laugh with an even more phony yawn.
When Ed first moved to Wileyville from Michigan to take over the town pharmacy, he’d told everyone he had come South to thaw out. Nearly a quarter of a century later, and despite the fact that in his work he had ministered to them in every conceivable situation known to man and medicine, a lot of folks around town would tell you they still found the man’s demeanor a bit…glacial.
But they didn’t know him the way Sadie did. They didn’t know the warm and funny, private man who had courted her all those years ago and cared for her all these years since. Their marriage had set tongues wagging all over Wileyville. After all, she had hardly been twenty years old, and Ed more than a decade older, a businessman set in his ways and not from around here.
“Joke all you want,” Sadie said. “I realize how many people see my husband as not much more than the balding head lowered over their prescriptions at the back of the drugstore. But I know that when he lifts his head and looks up, he still only has eyes for me.”
“Now, that’s the kind of confidence I like to hear. Go on in there and make him look up.” The shove in the right direction Mary Tate started to give Sadie suddenly turned into a grab at her arm and backward tug. “But let’s not startle the life out of him when he does. Wait here a sec.”
“What? Why?”
Her companion had already darted inside. “Not bad, girls, not bad. Now each of you grab a chair and practice taking your seats in unison. Remember, no plunking down like you have rocks in your pockets. Lower yourself to the edge of the seat and perch!”
Chair legs scraped over the floorboards.
Quarrelsome voices rose, then just as quickly fell.
Mary Tate appeared from the back room dragging behind her a canvas tote on wheels. It thumped and bumped along over the threshold and onto the sidewalk.
Sadie stared at it. “You plan on moving in with me, the better to do a total makeover?”
“This? This is just the bare necessities.” The heavy brass zipper ripped open, and Mary Tate began to rummage around inside. “If I ever did put my mind to doing a makeover on you, sweetie, you’d have to clear the driveway and set up a delivery ramp, because I’d haul stuff in by the truckload.”
“Truckload? Do I really need that much?” Did she have to ask? Anyone paying the least bit of attention could have seen how she had let her appearance slide. And at thirty-nine, she’d already been on a downward slope to begin with.
She made a quick survey of the woman looking back at her in the window. Hair—blah. Complexion—blah. Outfit, attitude, overall physical condition—blah, blah, blob.
“Would you look at me?” She leaned forward and pulled her
cheeks back with both hands, hoping that might help her look a little less like a basset hound with a sleep disorder. “No wonder when Mayor Furst needed to fill a slot working among the living impaired, he thought of me.”
“Start the music again, girls, and walk it through from the beginning. I may be a minute,” Mary Tate bellowed. Then she turned and cast a worried gaze at her friend. “Sadie, what in the world are you talking about?”
“The mayor offered me a job this morning—running the cemetery.”
“A new job!” She handed Sadie a hairbrush and went to work applying blush in quick decisive strokes. “When do you start?”
Sadie tamed the worst of her dull tangle of curls down and tossed the brush back into the case. “I don’t.”
The plastic blush case snapped shut. Mary Tate frowned. “Why not?”
She wished people would quit asking her that. “Because…well, because…did you not hear what I said? He wants me to run the cemetery.”
“I heard. Do this.” She opened her mouth and looked up.
Sadie complied.
It was a true validation of the depths of their friendship that Sadie willingly stood right out there in public, giving free rein over her face to a woman who did her own makeup in such a way that she seemed always in a state of perpetually flushed surprise.
“Sadie, it seems to me that God has seen fit to bonk you on the noggin with this blessing, and you don’t even have the good sense to embrace it.”
“Bonk me on the noggin?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Some hear a still, small voice. Others see a heavenly host of angels. Me, I take a blow to the head? Though, come to think of it, that does sound like the kind of blessing I’d have bestowed on me.”
“That’s because when the Lord has to deal with the chronically mule-headed, even He sometimes has to do something to get their attention.”
“But the cemetery, Mary Tate?”
