Chapter Nine
H ow long are you going to ignore all that mail? Aunt Gracie’s voice was loud and clear in my head that afternoon when I walked past the stacks of unopened envelopes and magazines piled up on the credenza. I had put off opening the mail for weeks. By just scanning through the messy piles, I could tell that a lot of it involved sympathy cards, and reading through them would make her passing so final. If I didn’t read them, then I could pretend she was out visiting Jasper and would be coming through the back door at any time.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I muttered as I shot the mail a dirty look and went on into the kitchen.
The leftover muffins from that morning were my lunch, along with a banana and a tall glass of sweet tea. Mama would fuss at me for not eating my vegetables, but one day a week with no green beans or broccoli wouldn’t hurt me. When I had finished eating, I headed through the foyer and set my foot on the first step going upstairs. Refusing to even glance at the stacks of mail, I said, “Today, I’m going to clean some more in Aunt Gracie’s room.”
A piece of mail fluttered through the air and landed at my feet. “Okay, okay, I get the message,” I declared with a long sigh. “I’ll clean off the credenza before I go upstairs, but understand that I’m doing this against my will.”
My bare feet made slapping sounds against the hardwood floors as I marched to the utility room, dumped the laundry basket full of towels that needed to be folded on top of the washing machine, and carried it back to the foyer. I brushed all the mail into the basket and sat down on the floor to go through it piece by piece.
“I will not ...” The words were barely out of my mouth when I remembered having to write I will not chew gum in Mrs. Hudson’s class again fifty times. “I will not toss the mail on the credenza and wait so long to go through it again,” I said aloud. “If I do, I will have to write sentences.”
Envelopes that were clearly junk mail were tossed across the foyer toward the door; I would bring a trash bag in later and gather them all up. Then I began to sort through those that looked like they held greeting cards; they went to my right. The others that had a business-return label went to the left. All kinds of companies packaged their promotional materials that way just to throw a person off, so I wasn’t expecting much. I would give them a fighting chance, but most likely they would wind up in the pile to be trashed.
My hands trembled when I picked up that first card, but I was determined to bite the bullet, so to speak. I opened it to find a sympathy card with a field of Texas bluebonnets on the front. I glanced up at a small picture sitting on the credenza—Mama and me before I was even walking—in a field of blue flowers. Inside the card was a nice little greeting, but it was the note on the side that brought tears in my eyes.
I don’t know who will be reading this, but I’m so sorry for y’all’s loss. Miz Gracie saved me. I came from a big family, and my folks thought only the boys should have an education. Girls didn’t matter so much, since all they would be doing was keeping house and rocking cradles. I was about to quit school after the eighth grade, but Miz Gracie gave me a part-time job in her store—taught me all about how to be a modern young lady. Then she gave me the money to go to college. I am now a retired schoolteacher, and I owe it all to Grace Evans. I just wanted whoever is reading this to know how much good she did.
By the time I reached the sixth card, the dam holding back tears let loose. By the tenth one, I was really sobbing. Aunt Gracie had touched so many people’s lives, yet she’d never bragged about her generosity. She used to tell me that crying was good for the soul. If that was the truth, then my heart shouldn’t even have a speck of dust on it.
I didn’t want to read anymore, but staring at the stack of unopened ones was like passing a car wreck on the side of the road. I couldn’t look away from the accident any more than I could throw all the rest of the cards into the trash can without opening them.
“Lila, where are you?” Mama’s voice sounded like it was a mile away.
I rubbed my face on a corner of my shirt, but another batch of tears started up as soon as I did.
“Delilah Grace, are you home?” Her tone was somewhere between angry and worried. “I’ve called you a dozen times, and it’s going straight to voicemail.”
I reached for my phone, but it wasn’t in my hip pocket.
“In the foyer,” I called out between sobs.
Something rattled on the cabinet, and then I heard Mama running across the kitchen and into the foyer. She sat down beside me and wrapped me up in her arms, patting my back the whole time. “What’s the matter?”
I pointed at the sympathy cards strewn all around me. “Those happened.”
Mama dried my tears on a tissue she pulled from her purse. “I should have been here with you when you tackled this job.”
“Almost every one of them has a story to tell about how Aunt Gracie helped them,” I said between hiccups. “And there’s at least fifty more of them that need to be opened.”
“She believed in women empowering women,” Mama said, her voice cracking. She took a deep breath and went on. “Long before the concept was even a popular thing. I’ll help you go through the rest. You should have called me before you even started. What do you think we should do with them?”
“I’ll put them in a box with other things like her diary and store it up in the attic. Maybe someday I’ll get rid of them, but not for a while.” I opened another one, and the greeting alone brought on a fresh river of tears, and the little note—from someone named Martha—was so sweet that I wished Aunt Gracie could read it for herself.
Then, in a split second, anger replaced the tears. “Why do people wait until someone is gone to tell the survivors how much that person meant to them?” I asked through clenched teeth. “These people should have written letters to Aunt Gracie while she was alive, not to us after she is gone.”
“Maybe that should be a lesson to us,” Mama said. “I’m pretty sure they would have written thank-you notes to her through the years. You might even find some tucked away in the attic. She never was one to throw anything out.”
I put the card back in the envelope and gently laid it with the others. “Someday, when and if I ever have children, they can learn just how great Aunt Gracie was by reading all these notes. Why didn’t she ever get married and have children?”
Mama took another tissue from her purse and handed me a fresh one. “I asked her that many years ago. She said even though we had only a slight connection through her mother, birth and blood didn’t always make a family. She also told me that Jasper was as much her brother as real kinship could have ever made him, and that she had me for a daughter and you for a granddaughter. Do you know what she would tell us right now?”
I dried my eyes and took a deep breath. “To pull ourselves up by the bootstraps?”
“Something like that,” Mama answered. “She would say that she raised us both to be strong, and that we need to stop weeping and wailing and get on with life.”
“‘Life is short, at best,’” I said, quoting something she’d said many times, “‘so don’t waste a single second of it.’”
“You sound just like her.” Mama stood up and headed back to the kitchen. “Have you eaten lunch?”
My bones creaked when I got up and followed her. “I had a leftover muffin and then started sorting through the mail. I could make sandwiches and open up a can of soup.”
“Let’s go to Annie’s. Her Saturday special is pinto beans and corn bread.”
“And greens with hot sauce?” I asked.
“Yep, and fried potatoes on the side.” Half a smile broke through the sad expression on Mama’s face.
“That was Aunt Gracie’s favorite meal. Seems only fitting, after this morning,” I said. “I’ll get my purse and meet you out front.”
“Let’s take Aunt Gracie’s car today,” Mama said. “It hasn’t been driven since the week before she passed away.”
“I’m not sure I can drive it without crying.”
“Yes, you can, and you will,” Mama declared. “She intended for you to have it, along with everything else. It needs to be driven often so that it doesn’t just sit in the garage and rust. I’ll be waiting on the front porch.”
I went through the foyer, picked my purse up off a ladder-back chair, and walked out the front door. The garage had been added onto the house long after it was built and was set just a little ways off to the right. Aunt Gracie had an automatic door installed after I was away to college, and as luck would have it, I forgot to get the thing out of the bowl on the credenza.
“Got to go back inside and get the opener thing,” I told Mama.
“You should keep it in your purse,” she suggested.
“You are right,” I agreed.
I stepped over the mess of junk mail I’d left on the floor, got the opener, and hurried back outside. An old song popped into my head that said something about always being seventeen in your hometown. I was realizing that it was the absolute truth. I had been out on my own for more than a decade, and here I was, obeying Jasper and my mother even better than when I was living at home. Maybe it was because I had just had a meltdown over dozens of sympathy cards.
The garage door felt like curtains opening before the first act of a play—slowly, as if it was teasing me and Mama. The garage used to be so clean that a person could have eaten off the floor. The tools were still put away neatly, and the 1957 Ford Fairlane—red, with a swoosh above the front doors—sat in the middle of the floor like a king on a throne. But there was a layer of dust everywhere.
“Those last months of Gracie’s life must have been tougher than I realized. The yard needs desperate help, and there’s dust on everything in the house. Look at her precious Ford, Mama. It used to shine,” I said as I slid behind the wheel.
Mama got into the car. “I used to say that Grace Evans never met a speck of dust she couldn’t conquer. She never let on that she didn’t feel good, so I didn’t know.”
Brave and selfless, I thought as I started the engine and backed out of the garage.
“She told me that she bought this to celebrate her thirtieth birthday,” Mama said.
“Jasper said that her mother drove a Caddy.”
“That’s right. Her father got a brand-new Chevy truck every year,” Mama said. “When I asked her why she bought a Ford, she said that Davis always liked Ford vehicles. He must’ve been a very good friend for her to keep him in her heart so long.”
I thought of the red bedspread and red underwear, and of that entry in her diary about what her mother told her. The red car was probably part of that same rebellion, but I wasn’t ready to share what I’d read—not even with my mama.
I put the car in Drive and slowly made my way down the lane. “I feel like I’m driving a boat instead of a car.”
“But aren’t these wide seats nice?” Mama said. “Your father had an older car with wide seats ...” She blushed scarlet.
“Was I conceived in a big back seat?” I asked.
Her cheeks turned a deeper shade of scarlet. “Most likely you were. God, but I loved that boy, and God only knows why, because I knew in my heart he wouldn’t settle down. Still, I couldn’t refuse him anything he wanted. I knew my folks would disown me if they found out about him, but at the time, I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with him.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “You have loved him forever, and he loved you for a season.”
Mama nodded. “Well put. And together we made you, and that way I got to keep a little piece of him forever.”
“Weren’t you mad at him for leaving you when you told him you were pregnant?” I asked.
“I should have been, but a part of me knew that he didn’t love me like I did him,” Mama answered. “I was angrier at him for not ever getting in touch with me in the next years. He should have cared about his child. The only one that showed me any love was Aunt Gracie. Mama and Daddy had different rules for me and my brothers. They kept a tight leash on me, but the boys could get away with anything. Thank goodness for Aunt Gracie.” She dabbed at her eyes with another tissue that she’d pulled out of her purse. “You’d think I would be done grieving by now.”
“I’m not sure we’ll ever be over it totally, not even after we reach that final step of acceptance,” I said around the lump in my throat.
Silence filled the car for a few seconds before she went on. “She came to the house when she found that my folks were throwing me out because I was pregnant. According to them, I had disgraced the Matthews name. While Mama was cramming my things into garbage bags, I called Aunt Gracie. I’d only just gotten out to the front lawn with everything I owned in two black plastic bags when Aunt Gracie drove up in this very car, in her best red pantsuit, and stormed into the house without even knocking. She lit into my folks like a mama bear and told them what she thought of them for what they were doing, in a voice so loud that folks all the way to Poteet probably heard her. There was a lot of screaming and Bible verses quoted, but she finally came outside and told me to put all those bags in the back seat of this Ford.”
“What did she say to you?” I asked.
“She said that I was not to look back but to keep my eyes forward.”
“Did you?”
“Of course I did.”
I turned toward Poteet and tried to imagine Aunt Gracie raising her voice but couldn’t. “Was she talking about right then or the future?”
“Both,” Mama said. “She wanted me to go to college that fall, but by the time I graduated, I was sick of school. Sometimes I wonder if our lives would have been different if I had taken her up on her offer to pay for me to go.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” I reminded her. “We have always had plenty, Mama. I never knew that we weren’t as rich as all the fancy kids I went to school with.”
She laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad.”
“Do you think your folks are still alive?” I asked.
“Have no idea,” Mama answered. “I’ve never heard from them, but Jasper told me they had moved to Wyoming.”
“Want me to get in touch for you?” I asked.
“They know where I am,” she said with a serious expression on her face. “Let’s talk about ... Oh my goodness!”
“What?” I almost stomped on the brake.
“Beans and corn bread is one of Jasper’s favorite meals, too. We should have asked him to come with us,” she said.
“We’ll order a take-out box for him.”
I snagged a parking place close to the front entrance of the small café. “He’ll like that. It’s hard to think that Annie won’t be running this joint in just a couple of weeks. Both this place and Madge’s Diner have been around longer than I’ve been alive.”
“Honey, they’ve been in business since before I was born. Madge told me once that Gracie bailed her out during the tough times when the pandemic shut down so many places.” Mama got out of the car and ducked when a loud clap of thunder right above our heads sounded like it was raining potatoes down from the sky. “Good Lord! Where did that come from?”
I pointed to the southwest. “Looks like we’re in for some bad weather. Must have something to do with Annie’s Café. It rained when Jasper and I came for Sunday dinner last week.”
She laughed at my remark as dark clouds obliterated the sun and lightning shot through the sky. Thunder followed and several folks came running out of the café.
“Want to go in or head back home for a sandwich?” I asked.
“I’ve got my heart set on a bowl of beans. We can wait out the storm inside. Even if we get wet, I don’t expect a little rainwater will melt either one of us.”
A memory popped into my head of a day when I must have been four or five years old. A spring shower came up, and since there was no lightning, Aunt Gracie and I had gone outside and played in the rain. We had held hands and played ring-around-the-rosy and giggled for the better part of an hour. Then we had run inside, gotten into dry clothing, and had hot chocolate and cookies. I remembered asking her if she had done that when she was a little girl, and she shook her head.
“Mother said I had to be a lady and live up to the Evans name.” Her voice became harsh and she shook her finger. “‘Ladies do not dance around like heathens in the rain. What would people think?’” Then her tone softened, and she smiled at me. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t dance in the rain.”
We barely made it into the café before raindrops the size of lemons began to fall. The place had emptied out except for Annie and a couple of waitresses, who were having a glass of tea in a back booth.
Annie waved from the back of the dining area. “Did the storm blow y’all in here?”
“Almost,” Mama said. “There’s only one place in Poteet to get pinto beans and corn bread.”
“You’re in luck,” Annie said. “There’s probably enough left for a couple of plates.”
“Think you could make that three?” I asked. “We’d like to take some to Jasper.”
“I’m sure I can,” Annie said and motioned for one of the waitresses. “Gina Lou, fix these people up and bring me a glass of sweet tea to have with them while they eat. Allie, you can flip the sign to Closed.”
The blonde waitress headed for the door just as it opened, and a tall fellow stepped inside. He hung his yellow slicker on the back of a chair and sat down at a table across the room.
“Hi, ladies. The storm hit the ranch half an hour ago. It’s moving slow, and the weatherman said it could settle right over Poteet until midnight or later,” he said before he blinked a couple of times and then smiled. “Lila Matthews, is that you?”
His voice sounded slightly familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it or to his round face. His spurs jingled when he crossed his legs at the ankles, and his black cowboy hat looked weather beaten. “You don’t know me, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Your voice sounds—”
“Derrick Marston,” he said as he removed his hat. “I sat in front of you in homeroom all through high school. Had a big crush on you but was too shy to say anything.”
“I remember you now.” He had been a foot shorter than me and his red hair was longer these days. “So, are you still living around these parts?”
“Oh, yeah,” Derrick said. “I’m running the Double M down south of town for my dad. I heard you had come home—and, honey, I’m not shy anymore. So, can I take you to dinner some evening, and maybe a movie?”
“Of course you can, but it might be best to call her and not spring that on her right here in public,” Mama jumped in. “Gracie left her place to Lila, and she’s living in Ditto. If there’s a phone book lying around your ranch, you’ll find the number for Grace Evans in it.”
“Fair enough,” Derrick said. “Annie, darlin’, will you bring me a burger and double order of fries?”
Gina Lou looked like she could chew up nails and spit out staples, but she forced a smile.
“I’ll take care of that for you, Derrick,” Gina Lou said through that rigid smile. There was something painful in her gaze, yet she’d been so quick to wait on him. She tucked a strand of blonde hair back into her ponytail and smoothed her apron. Her T-shirt, which had A NNIE ’ S C AFé written across the chest, was tucked into her jeans to show off a tiny waist. If she could sing, she could have run Dolly Parton some serious competition in Nashville.
“Thanks, Gina,” Derrick said and pulled his buzzing cell phone from his pocket. He stood up and went to the far corner of the room, talked in a low tone for a minute, and then called out, “Cancel that order. Looks like my prize bull has broken through the fence. Nothing like trying to corral a bull in a vicious thunderstorm. I’ll call you later, Lila.”
I waved and waited for him to put his slicker on and disappear outside before I raised an eyebrow at my mother. “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of my own love life. I wasn’t attracted to Derrick in high school, and even though he’s now six feet tall and let his hair grow out, I’m still not. I don’t want to go out with him, and when he calls—”
“Thank God!” Gina Lou burst out.
“Why would you say that?” Annie asked as she set platters of food in front of me and Mama.
“I dated him for several months and flat out fell in love with him.”
“What happened?” Mama asked.
Annie pulled out a chair and sat down at the table with us. “Same old love story as you had all those years ago, Sarah. She thought she was pregnant, but it was a false alarm. He wasn’t willing to step up and face the responsibilities.”
“Hard lesson learned,” Gina Lou said as the corners of her lips trembled.
Mama took a drink of her tea. “Been there, done that. Honey, you are better off without a man like that.”
“Don’t I know it,” she said. “But I’m still working on getting my heart caught up to my common sense.”
“You still want me to go out with him, Mama?” I had no intentions of going anywhere with Derrick, but I had to ask anyway.
“Not if he’s that kind.” Mama took another long drink of her sweet tea. “He was so polite and sweet when he came into Madge’s Diner, and always left a good tip.”
“He was sweet to me,” Gina Lou said with a long sigh. “Until he wasn’t.”
“He’s a charmer, all right,” Annie said, “and I bet he was happy to run into you. He’s been bragging around town that he’s going to own Gracie’s place by Christmas, even if he has to buy the cow to get the property. He wants to tear it down and plow up the strawberries.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“As soon as marijuana is legal in Texas, he’s going to be a big weed king,” Gina Lou answered. “That place is only the beginning of his big dream to make millions growing pot.”
I wondered if Connor had the same thing in mind. After all, his relatives had started with cattle, moved to oil, and toyed with strawberries. Were they getting ready to cash it all in for a marijuana farm? Then a picture of a big black-and-white cow passed through my mind. “We have a dog on the property, but not a cow.”
“ You are the cow,” Gina Lou giggled. “He used to talk about how he would buy up the whole town of Ditto for his new enterprise.”
“Well, this cow isn’t for sale,” I huffed. “So Derrick can go find some other cows to build his empire on.”