Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“Sure can, but I promised Anna here a trip down the slide.” Jackson’s drawl flared, but not in the comfortable telling-stories-with-Lance-and-Kaci kind of way. Nope, this was his fake redneck act. “Wouldn’t be right gentlemanly of me to not show her a good time.”
Something shuttered closed in his momma’s eyes, but she aimed a lip smile at Anna. “We’ll chat over dinner.”
“That’ll be nice,” Anna said.
Jackson led her out the back door to the massive acres of green lawn, where Radish greeted them both with sloppy dog kisses.
Outside, his tension faded until he was back to his easygoing, blood-pressure-free self.
He snagged a couple of swings from a shed attached to the house, then led her around to the side of the yard, beyond his momma’s view from the kitchen window, where a gargantuan wooden play fort dominated the ground.
That slide did look like fun.
A lot more fun than staying with his momma in the kitchen.
If she’d had aspirations of being his long-term, permanent girlfriend, she might’ve asked about his relationship with his momma. But she was here as Louisa’s guest for a football game tomorrow, not as the woman Jackson was sleeping with, so she didn’t ask.
And he didn’t offer.
But he did show her a good time on the play fort, fully clothed and G-rated and everything.
“We’re not staying here tonight,” Jackson said while he pushed her on a swing.
She looked back at him. “No?”
“Didn’t want the hoity-toity décor giving you nightmares of debutante mommas attacking you in your sleep.” He gave her a crooked grin, and soon she was laughing so hard she had to stop the swing.
Jackson came around to sit on the ground in front of her, that crooked grin getting wider, the orneriness in his eyes lighting his entire face.
“Gotta be honest here, Anna Grace. This isn’t actually me being a gentleman and thinking of your feelings.
It’s that I ain’t been allowed to sleep here since I betrayed ’em all by going to Bama. ”
“Oh, look, he’s smiling,” a female voice suddenly said.
Anna choked back her laughter. Jackson stayed loose and relaxed. He climbed to his feet and helped her out of the swing. A small family approached. “Friendlies?” she said.
Jackson chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”
He seemed happy enough to introduce her to his stepbrother and his family.
Craig was tall and lanky, with a plain face and somber manner of speaking, not at all what she expected out of a guy who’d once helped Jackson make an airplane motored by his momma’s vacuum engine.
Maura was bubbly and pleasantly round, with lips that stretched in a perpetual smile.
Their girls were three and one, and they were as much fun as Anna’s nephews had been at that age.
While she and Maura and the girls played, Jackson and Craig caught up with hunting and fishing and work stories.
But soon Deb called everyone to dinner, and they went inside. The smell of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and unfortunately, stewed okra, covered the stifling scent of money and prestige.
Once again, Anna felt like she was living in a completely different world.
Louisa had arrived and was waiting at the table. Anna was introduced to Russ, Jackson’s stepfather, and found him to be a somewhat more relaxed version of his son, and surprisingly pleasant given her knowledge that Jackson didn’t care much for him.
Obviously a story there.
None of her business.
Dinner was accompanied by painfully polite but nonetheless enlightening conversation.
Anna hadn’t realized that Jackson’s stepfather was the second-generation president and owner of Whipple PeachNuts, the largest chain of tourist-stop peach and pecan stands in the southeast. Every new tidbit about Jackson and his family made her eyebrows inch up, and every quarter-inch of raised brows on her part seemed to result in smug satisfaction on Deb’s part.
Despite the pleasant top conversation, the underlying tensions were choking her.
Even the mystery ingredient making the collard greens about the best vegetable Anna had eaten without ketchup in decades couldn’t ease her discomfort, nor did Jackson’s pointedly passing the stewed okra around her so she didn’t feel obligated to try it, since he'd been witness to the last time she’d gotten up close and personal with okra.
But at least nothing was truly personal for Anna.
That, apparently, was reserved for the course between dinner and dessert.
One by one, everyone finished their food. Russ, Deb, Craig, and Maura lined their silverware in the middle of their plates and pushed them back discreetly. Maura settled her older girl’s plate as well, then produced a wet wipe for the baby’s face.
Jackson left his silverware skewed across his plate, but wasn’t as dismissive of table manners as his sister, who leaned her elbows on the table. At some invisible signal, Craig picked up his and Maura’s plates. Jackson took his and Anna’s.
“I can—” she started, but stopped herself.
For the first time since they’d come inside, she caught an amused gleam in Jackson’s eye. “Thank you, Anna Grace.”
He and Craig disappeared into the kitchen. Deb dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, tucked it back onto her lap, smiled pleasantly, and tilted forward. “Maura, dear, do you remember the Fillmounts?”
Anna put her hands in her lap and ignored the crick in her shoulders from sitting erect for the last forty-five minutes.
Maura’s face crinkled, then her omnipresent smile beamed larger. “Oh, yes! That lovely couple from down the street. They gave us the nicest set of matching crystal frames for our wedding.”
“Mm, that’s them,” Deb said. “They’re getting divorced.”
Anna shivered against a sudden case of prickles on the back of her neck and knees that reminded her of Riverdancing fire ants.
“Oh, no,” Maura said.
“Wasn’t he her second husband?” Louisa said.
Make that Riverdancing on speed.
“Mm-hmm. So sad, but of course, not so surprising.” Deb turned that conversational smile to Anna. “She cheated on her first husband too, bless her heart.”
Anna made a noncommittal kind of noise.
“Divorce is so sad, don’t you agree, Anna dear?”
Something clinked in the kitchen, but it had nothing on the panic crashing through her core.
Deb knew.
She knew Anna was divorced, and she knew her son could do a lot better than a divorced, undereducated, okra-hating, middle-class woman from Podunk, Minnesota.
And she wanted to make sure Anna knew it too.
What Anna wouldn’t have given for her label maker. There wasn’t even anything to straighten in front of her. She’d left no crumbs to straighten on the tablecloth, and she would’ve bet the freaking grains of wood beneath it were evenly spaced too.
She’d learned a lot about Southern hospitality in her time here, but she’d also learned there was an unspoken pride in being born Southern that she would never fully understand or like.
She was an outsider, and they wanted to make sure she knew it.
If this were anyone other than Jackson’s family, she’d make her excuses and leave, because none of this made her feel comfortable, and she didn’t even know what she’d done wrong other than show up as his friend.
She tried to match Deb’s pleasant expression, but suspected she looked like the collard greens had given her food poisoning instead. So she tried a lighthearted laugh.
Which came out about as pleasant as a chicken choking on the carcass of its first cousin. She cleared her throat and went back to the food poisoning look.
Was divorce sad? Deb certainly had the Southern way of understating things down pat. “Well, of course.” Anna tried the choking chicken sound again and winced. “But really, can you imagine the alternative? That’d be a lot of dead husbands.”
Too late, she realized she was the only one laughing at her bad joke.
Deb snatched her water. The intricate diamonds of the crystal goblet cast unsteady prisms on the walls. Russ shot her one of those concerned husband looks, the kind that spoke of history and private stories and understanding of moods and hot buttons.
Louisa’s face went pale. Her eyes were a blue question mark of hurt, wavering between her mother and Anna.
Maura gaped at all of them.
Jackson shot back into the room, somehow managing to make what classified as a breakneck pace for him seem like a casual stroll through a pecan grove. He settled into the seat beside Anna and gave her knee a soft squeeze. “Awful nice of you to let Craig out for the game tomorrow,” he said to Maura.
Her perpetual smile wobbled. “He’s earned it.”
Russ cleared his throat. “Heard there’s a petition going around our homeowners’ association to lower the speed limit. You got a homeowners’ association over there in Georgia, Jackson?”
“Sure do,” Jackson drawled. His thumb brushed Anna’s leg, while his drawl went past comfortable to somebody’s-getting-rednecked. “Had to take down that there Ford I had up on blocks in my front yard. Fines were more’n I paid for the old piece of junk in the first place.”
The groove between Deb’s eyes grew deeper with every word he spoke. Russ’s jaw tightened.
Anna struggled for her voice. “Those collard greens are the best I’ve had since I moved down south,” she said. She tried to smile at Deb. “You must have a secret ingredient.”
“Are you divorced?” Louisa said.
“Louisa,” Jackson said on a low growl.
Anna put her hand over his. She was who she was, and her past was what it was. “Yes.”
Louisa was the only one at the table who seemed surprised. “For real?”
“Yes.”
The younger girl’s chin shifted back and forth. “But you don’t have any kids.”
“No.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Anna tensed. Jackson jerked in his seat. Louisa let out a yelp. She glared at him, but he cut her off with a curt, “Enough.”
“Craig says he got a great spot for tailgating tomorrow,” Maura said. “Getting out after the game should be a cinch.”
“He always did have luck with parking lots,” Russ said.
Were they kidding? They were talking about parking?
No wonder Jackson didn’t talk much about his family.
Louisa got another one of those gleams in her eye. The kind that normal people got when they were about to slip a snowball down their sister’s back in sub-zero temperatures.
The kind that made Anna wonder—again—if she should’ve declined the invitation to come this weekend.
“Momma says marry the first time for love, the second time for money.” Louisa’s face shone with a pompous arrogance she was entirely too young to properly manage.
But, unfortunately, she was entirely rich enough to try anyway, and she was sitting in a chair that probably cost Anna’s monthly salary, and she was implying that Anna was only here because she, too, wanted a chunk of Russ’s wallet.
The thought sparked a fuse she hadn’t realized she possessed.
Her temper rocketed into the stratosphere as if it were attached to Neil’s iPod and retainer. She savored the flight, narrowing in on her target, burning, building to her climax, and smiled sweetly through the flames spewing from her mouth. “Well, bless her heart.”
And then everything exploded in a silent, slow-motion shower of embers, burning out the last bits of her anger as they hit the frosty air, as if she were watching the fireworks from far away and hadn’t heard the boom yet.
Deb’s lip curled. Her breasts rose, shoulders bouncing back. Her hand fluttered to her chest.
Louisa choked on something akin to a laugh-gasp.
Maura’s hand flew to her lips.
Russ’s mustache twitched. He discreetly coughed into a napkin. Bless his heart.
And then the boom hit.
Her chair jerked out from beneath her.
It would be a long walk back to Georgia.