“Julia, I was thinking that maybe, just for the time being, I’d move out to the house. But I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings. You and Ed have been so good to me!”
Her aunt set a rose pink cup down in its saucer. “This isn’t because of anything we’ve said or done?”
“No, ma’am. Part of it is a convenience issue. I’m usually so tired by the time I finish at night, I might as well sleep at Mae’s. But more than that, I want to prove to myself that I’m honestly making the place inhabitable. Of course, to actually inhabit it, I’ll need some furniture basics. I suppose I could use a sleeping bag, but I’d rather not.”
Julia waved a hand. “Your uncle runs a furniture showroom. We are not letting any niece of ours sleep on the ground, for heaven’s sake. If you’re sure this is what you want, we’ll help.”
“I’m sure.” I think. “Oddly enough, feeling closer to you gives me the confidence to do it. If that makes sense.”
“You feel closer, so you’re ready to move farther away? No, dear, no sense whatsoever,” her aunt said fondly. “We’ll talk to Ed over dinner about some furniture options. And after this weekend’s big jewelry show in Waycomber, my schedule slows down until the holiday craft fairs start up in November, so I’ll be able to come over and help paint or wallpaper.”
“Thank you. God knows I could use the assistance.”
“Done, then.”
Once they’d finished their tea, they progressed to a nearby craft store in much higher spirits. Julia said she needed more “crimp beads,” which Pam gathered to be some sort of fasteners to keep stones in place so that a piece of jewelry hung properly. But no sooner did they get to the jewelry-making section of the store than Julia’s shopping list exploded from one item to ten.
“We may be here a while, dear.”
“No hurry,” Pam said indulgently. “I think I might want to commission you to make a couple of things.” Before she left town, she’d like to give presents to Trudy and Dawn. Maybe a necklace for the older woman and earrings for Dawn, something that wouldn’t get in her way or catch on her smock buttons at the salon.
Julia made a little murmuring noise to show she was listening as she rounded an aisle, never lifting her gaze from a row of red stones that were so alike in hue and size that Pam had no idea how her aunt could tell them apart. Sometimes, watching her aunt work, she thought that Aunt Julia’s hobby required vision and dexterity as precise as piloting a plane for the air force.
“Did you have specific colors in mind?” Julia asked. “Because if you do, we could get materials while we’re here.”
“No, I was mostly thinking out lou—” Pam stopped and nearly knocked into her aunt, who’d made another turn to investigate a rack of clearance inventory.
Right down the aisle from them stood Gwendolyn Shepard and one of her bridge club friends. The minute Gwendolyn saw them, she sucked in a breath, clearly affronted by Pam’s presence in the store. Or on the planet.
“You.” Gwendolyn’s eyes were her son’s, without any of the warmth. Her gaze was blue ice. “I heard you were in Mimosa, but I don’t think I really let myself believe it. Deep down, I didn’t think anyone would really be that brazen.”
Suddenly Aunt Julia was standing between them, crimp beads and semiprecious stones forgotten as she faced down Nick’s mother. “This town was Pamela Jo’s home and she has family here, same as your son. She has every right to visit whenever she wants.”
“Even if her being here is detrimental to an innocent child?” Gwendolyn demanded. She looked over Julia’s shoulder, once again skewering Pam with the force of her contempt. “I hope you’re happy! You’ve been here a matter of weeks, and already you’ve ruined that girl.”
Ruined? And I thought the twelve-year-old was melodramatic.
“That terrible haircut,” Gwendolyn sneered, taking in Pam’s own short hair. “Ditching class, running around with inappropriate boys!”
“As inappropriate as your son was as a teenager?” Julia interjected with saccharine sweetness.
Wow. You go, Aunt Julia. Pam was shocked to hear her aunt stick up for her so forcefully. Still, the last thing she wanted was an over-fifty catfight in the craft store.
“Ladies, why don’t we all agree to disagree and go our own separate ways?” she said. Would Nick tell his mother about this afternoon? No doubt Gwendolyn would add the blame for Faith’s outburst atop Pam’s other sins.
“Separate ways is a fine idea,” Gwendolyn said. “Keep that in mind, and stay away from my granddaughter and my son.”
“Nick’s a grown man now,” Julia said. “You can’t control him anymore. Not that you did such a great job of it even when he lived under your roof.”
With that Julia spun on her heel, and Pam quietly followed suit. They left the store without having bought anything. Once they’d reached the parking lot, Pam said, “Not that I don’t appreciate your taking my side … but what you said wasn’t particularly nice, Aunt Julia.”
Her aunt glanced up sheepishly from the remote that unlocked the car. “You’re right. But it was tremendously fun. Are you disappointed in me?”
Pam finally released the laughter that had been building ever since Julia had rendered Gwendolyn Shepard speechless. “Disappointed? If I ever win the lottery, I’m having a statue built in your honor. That was awesome!”
Julia smiled beatifically. “Drink more tea and eat less salt, dear, and we’ll call it even.”
NICK MARVELED AT the unspoken family politics that allowed his brother-in-law, A.J., as man and wage earner, to sit in the living room and unwind while the women cleaned up, yet Nick—also a male breadwinner—was expected to help with the dishes. Not that he minded working in the kitchen. On the contrary, if he could get Leigh and his mother to go in the next room, the cleaning job would be downright peaceful.
Instead, his mother and sister were harping at him. Faith and her cousins were all upstairs doing homework. Nick was seriously willing to consider some night courses if it got him out of this customary, tag-team browbeating.
“I’m not saying that I have an opinion on her hair,” Leigh explained defensively.
“Well, I do.” Their mother shoved a baking sheet into a cabinet with a metallic clatter. “And I hate it.”
“My point,” Leigh continued, “was simply that the hair is a first step. She did it without your permission, Nicky. The next thing you know, it escalates. Getting her ears pierced without asking first.”
“She already has pierced ears,” Nick pointed out, not that either of the females he was related to listened. He’d agreed to let Faith have her ears pierced as her birthday gift for her tenth birthday. How could it seem like such a long time ago and yet also feel just like yesterday? Having a child seriously messed with the time-space continuum.
“Tattoos!” Leigh was saying. Apparently her parenting credo was “Today, Short Hair—Tomorrow, a Belly Ring and a Boyfriend Named Viper.”
Nick banged a pot down on the counter, effectively catching both women’s attention. “Knock it off,” he said when he was certain they were listening. “For starters, Faith is scared of needles, so I think we can rule out tattoos.” She’d gone so pale after her ear piercings that he’d worried she would pass out. Although, even if she did come home with a nose or belly-button ring, it wasn’t as though he’d love her less.
“I’m proud of Faith,” he said. “My biggest overall complaint about her behavior, quite frankly, is her tendency to overreact. And now I’m thinking she gets that from us, the adults in her life. Leigh, you might as well be running in circles shouting, ‘The sky is falling.’”
His big sister sniffed. “That’s a hell of a way for you to talk to me in my own home!”
“I doubt you would have taken it any better in anyone else’s home,” he said. “You have got to get a hobby, take up meditation, find some way to relax. Along the way, you seem to have forgotten how to breathe.”
Leigh narrowed her eyes. “I breathe
just fine, thanks.”
Rather than get sucked into an intense argument about how easygoing his sister was, he turned to Gwendolyn. “And you! Your biggest goal in life seems to be keeping Faith away from Pam, but by demonizing her mother, you’re not only potentially harming Faith, you’re making her more curious and rebellious. When I talked to Pam about it—”
“You spoke to her?” Gwendolyn demanded. “Recently?”
“Two days ago. She came over for lunch. She loved your soup by the way.”
Gwendolyn, a normally dignified woman who disliked anyone making a scene, looked nearly apoplectic. “I knew this would happen, I knew it! You’ve never been able to stay away from that woman, and this time is no different. Didn’t I warn you?”
Nice to see they’d taken his comment about not overreacting to heart. “It was just a quick lunch to talk about Faith, figure out a parenting strategy.”
“She is not Faith’s parent,” Gwendolyn said in a low, dangerous voice. “Pardon my crudeness, but she was an incubator! She never cared for that girl. She didn’t put bandages on scraped knees or teach her multiplication facts or sing her to sleep at night. We did all that. We’re Faith’s family! Pamela Jo Wilson is merely a bad influence. It’s as I told her in the craft store—”
“You talked to Pam?” Nick was beyond affectionately annoyed now and moving into downright pissed.
“I didn’t show up at her house in the dead of night,” Gwendolyn snapped, “I merely ran into her while shopping.”
“And were no doubt your charming self,” Nick drawled sarcastically. He recalled all the subtle digs his mother had made over the years, the times he’d had to defend his girlfriend, “the daughter of that low-class Wilson woman,” to his mother. He didn’t think Gwendolyn was technically an evil person, but she was snobby and prejudiced when it came to anything involving her children.
What bothered him, remembering those many squabbles they’d had about Pam, was the way they’d suddenly stopped. When we got married. He’d been so shaken by the discovery that he was going to be a father, had felt so guilty and dependent on his folks, that he’d stopped voicing a dissenting opinion. He’d needed his mother and father to tell him everything would be all right, so he’d overlooked the less than warm reception they gave his bride. While Gwendolyn hadn’t been expressly hateful, neither had she rolled out the welcome mat.
“Oh, Nick.” Gwendolyn sat at one of the chairs around Leigh’s kitchen table—Leigh always ate at her table; she was the good sibling. “I don’t care whether I was charming to Pam when I saw her or not. What I care about is you and Faith. She needs to leave the both of you alone. I tried to appeal to her sense of decency, although that would assume she has one, and—”
“Mom, shut up.”
“Nicholas!”
“I should have asked you to butt out thirteen years ago. If I had, maybe I’d still be married.”
Gwendolyn’s eyes doubled in size. She was spluttering inarticulately, unable to form a whole word.
Leigh stepped in on her behalf. “Surely you’re not trying to blame us for what happened?”
“I blame all of us. Her, myself.” Before the baby came, when Pam had shut down emotionally, she’d tried to talk to him about his parents, the way their disapproval had chafed. But, needing his family’s support, he let himself believe she was exaggerating her pain. “You guys weren’t nice to her. She was a scared, teenage girl who didn’t have the benefit of coming from a stable family like I did. You two have always been so protective of me. If you’d extended even a little of that to her, made her feel like one of us, maybe …”
He clenched his fists together, wishing he really could do things over again. “Or maybe not. We’ll never know now, will we? The past is done. But this the present. And the two of you. Will. Be. Nice.” He felt like a comic strip character, the words appearing in a dialogue bubble over his head in all caps. “You’re not the mob. You don’t get to make her disappear or send her on a little drive.”
“We love you.” The way Leigh brandished a rubber-tipped spatula at him as though she might thwap him upside the head was at visual odds with her words. “You can’t honestly expect us to sit by and say nothing if we see you making mistakes!”
“I love you, too,” he told his sister, “and I value your input. But that’s what it has to be—input, just something I take into consideration before making my final decisions. You two can’t run my life, and I don’t want you running people out of it. If you can’t respect that, then maybe Faith and I need to think about settling somewhere other than Mimosa.”
Gwendolyn made a strangled noise. Nick crossed the room to get her a glass of water out of the refrigerator’s filtered faucet.
After she drank, she was composed enough to ask, “You’d really take my only granddaughter away from me?”
“Honestly?” He looked her in the eye. “I don’t know. But I hope you won’t push me so that we have to find out.” He knew that his mother had been lonely since his dad died; the last thing he wanted was to remove even more family from her life. But this controlling, hateful side of her was the one aspect of her he couldn’t tolerate. He’d done so for years, thinking that he was being a dutiful son, but now he had Faith to think about, too.
“I don’t know if Pam will be staying in Mimosa much longer,” he said, wishing the thought of her going didn’t cause such a sharp twinge. “But we don’t own the town. She has every right to be here, and Faith is actually hoping to be closer to her mother before she leaves. We will be supportive and nontoxic in our remarks. Agreed?”
Leigh shot him a look. He doubted he’d be invited back to dinner at his sister’s anytime soon. And if he was, he was pretty sure she planned to spit in his food. But she nodded.
“Good. Thank you,” he said. “Mom?”
“You’ve always had a blind spot when it came to that woman,” Gwendolyn grumbled. “Now is no different. You’re not even a couple anymore, and you’d choose her over family?”
“Mom, for a while, she was my family, and I made a mistake in not choosing her. Trust me, you’re a better person than this.”
“I’ll be civil to her if I happen to see her,” Gwendolyn vowed grudgingly. “And I won’t speak an ill word of her in front of Faith. But the day Pamela Jo leaves town, I plan to dance a damn jig.”
Well, it was a start anyway.
Chapter Twelve
When headlights flashed through the untreated windows at the front of the house, Pam assumed her aunt and uncle had forgotten something. After all, they’d only left about ten minutes ago. She went to the front door, which she’d locked behind them, and was surprised to glimpse Nick coming up the sidewalk. Her first panicked reaction at seeing him out here unannounced on a Friday night was that something must have happened to Faith. But logic kicked in as she was opening the door—in an emergency situation, it would have been quicker to simply call her.
Still, she couldn’t help greeting him with, “Is everything okay? Faith, is she—”
“She’s fine,” he assured her. “She’s at a slumber party at her friend Tasha’s house. Of course, Morgan was invited, too, so they’ve probably all sneaked out and are merrily toilet-papering the neighborhood even as we speak.” He swatted away a couple of moths that were drawn to the light spilling from the doorway. “Can I come in?”
Pam took a step back, giving him room.
He glanced around, his expression unreadable. “You’re making progress.”
“Thanks,” she said shyly. She felt like a painter who’d had an unexpected visitor to the studio, viewing a potential masterpiece when it was only half-finished. Did Nick see the as yet unrealized charm in the place, or was his vision obscured by holes that still needed to be spackled in the walls and a naked lightbulb shining where she hadn’t hung the new fixture?
Furnishings in the house were sparse but adequate. In the living room, she had a couch from her uncle’s store and an Ole Miss beanbag chair. The closest sh
e had to a table was a crate, but Uncle Ed was expecting a shipment of secondhand furniture from an estate sale next week; there might be something promising in that. She didn’t have a television, which wouldn’t have done her any good, anyway. Although the electricity was on, as well as running water in all but the smaller bathroom at the end of the hall, there was no gas or cable right now. The only cooking she could do was in the microwave, but it would be November before anyone would need central heating out here.
A semi-stocked refrigerator hummed in the next room, Aunt Julia had given her a free-standing, antique linen wardrobe for towels and sheets, and in the main bedroom, there was a futon that pulled out into a queen-size bed. Beats sleeping in my car.
She gestured graciously toward the new sofa. “Have a seat. Want a bottle of water? Afraid I’m pretty limited in my refreshment options.”
“No, thanks. I’m good. Did I catch you at a bad time? If you have a few minutes to take a break, I thought maybe we could talk.” He patted the cushion next to him.
Pam’s self-preservation instincts murmured that she should ignore the patting and take the beanbag chair, but that was ridiculous. She didn’t want to sit at his feet, looking up at him like a child at story time, and there was plenty of room on the couch. She’d survived sitting right next to him in his living room the other day. We were chaperoned then.
They hadn’t been alone in a dark house, in the exact room where they’d first made love. She brushed her hands over the denim cutoffs she wore, trying to dust away the memories with the grit. Staying as close to the opposite edge as possible, she sat with him.
“I probably don’t smell so good,” she said bluntly. “I’ve been working hard since two o’clock this afternoon.”
Nick laughed. “You smell fine, but thanks for the warning.”
Curiosity was eating at her. “If you’re not here because of Faith,” she wondered, “what was so important that you drove out after dark instead of just picking up the phone?”
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