Chapter 10
TILLEY The Bourbon
They know, Tilley thought. She didn’t know why she wasn’t in her normal seat. And where were Mama and Daddy to protect her? Because these people, they were all here to get her. They knew what her sister Elizabeth had helped her do. And now she was going to pay.
She heard Ms. Theodora saying, “Well, we just have to pray for mercy on whoever’s soul did this horrible thing,” and, like being swooshed through a tunnel of light, Tilley was back in the here and now.
She wasn’t a twenty-year-old girl, she remembered.
She was in her late fifties now, a fully grown woman.
And these people around her were her family.
Mama and Daddy were dead. No one was here to get her…
It had been decades. She slowed her breathing and picked up her glass with a shaky hand.
The bourbon would fortify her. It always did.
Robbie, her favorite, was next to her. She knew she shouldn’t have a favorite, but she had been through a lot in her life and, damn it, she’d do as she pleased.
Mason was across from her with a girl she didn’t know but who had very nice hair.
Robbie’s oldest, Robbie Junior, was to her left.
She looked down at her hands. The hands of a woman caught between middle age and old age.
It still shocked her sometimes to realize that she had lived all this life, so many years since her beloved Robert left her, passed away so suddenly, leaving her with nothing but the disappointment of broken dreams and a class ring she wore forever on her left hand.
Her mama and daddy, when they were still alive, tried to convince her to make a fresh start, even date again, but who would want her now, as she was?
She couldn’t imagine. Dogwood was her home, then, now, and forever.
Even in her death, she knew she would roam the halls of Dogwood, crying out for the love she’d lost, all the family that never was.
But if that was the price she paid for love, she’d do it all over again.
She knew she would. And that was the thought that allowed her to sleep soundly at night.
Or, she thought, as she took a sip of her tea, maybe that was the bourbon.