Epilogue
March, ten years later
A conversation in the next aisle of the grocery store stopped me in my tracks on the Saturday morning before Easter. Two ladies were talking about which wine to buy for dinner the next day.
The one with a nasal twang said, “Well, I’m picking up three bottles of Strawberry Grace. It sells out within days of them stocking it here.”
“Can I help you ladies?” a stock boy asked.
“We were just talking about this strawberry wine,” the one with a smoker’s voice said.
“I just put out a case this morning,” he said. “That was twelve bottles, and there’s only six left.”
“Not anymore,” Smoker said. “I’m taking the last three. You best go get another case.”
“Can’t.” His voice faded as he walked away, but I heard, “We could only get one this season. The big cities have found it, and they preorder as much as they can get.”
“Mama, why did you stop?” my nine-year-old daughter asked. “Daddy will be waiting for us.”
I tucked her red hair behind her ear. “I was thinking about how neat it is that your daddy and daughter dance next weekend is right at the end of the spring strawberry season.”
She seemed to float on air as she walked along beside me. “I’m so happy that he’s going shopping with us to find my dress. Jasper is jealous because I get Daddy all to myself, and he can’t go.”
“Your little brother can stay home with me.” I set all my items on the cash register conveyor belt. “We’ll have a mama-and-son night and watch a movie.”
Grace popped her hands on her hips. “Is he going to get to invite his friend Thomas to come over?”
“No, but if he did, you get the night with your dad, right?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Grace Thurman, you can’t be selfish,” I scolded. “You are going to get to go shopping and buy a new dress for the dance, and your daddy is spending the whole evening with you.”
Her grin reminded me of Aunt Gracie’s. “Yep, and I will have the most handsomest daddy there.”
“Yes, you will,” I agreed.
“I want a red dress,” she declared. “And will you do my nails with red polish?”
“I suppose you want red shoes, too?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am!”
Connor chuckled when Grace chose a bright red dress for the dance. “We marked our baby girl, didn’t we?”
I kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, yes, but then we couldn’t expect anything else. We made Grace’s room into a nursery for her. Then we named her Grace and have raised her to be independent.”
“I’m glad that Jasper and Grandpa got to spend some time with her. I wish they could have lived long enough to know that we named our son Jasper Everett after both of them,” Connor said with a sigh.
I slipped my arm around his waist as we made our way to the checkout counter. “They know. If we were to have a third child and it was a boy, would we name him Davis?”
“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked.
“Well, we do have one empty bedroom in our house,” I teased.
“It does seem a shame to leave that room empty, doesn’t it?”
“What room?” Grace asked. “Are you going to do something with the guest room?”
“Not for a little while,” I told her. “We need to stop by the store that sells fingernail polish and let you pick out the right red color.”
“You do realize that you aren’t going to be able to redirect her to another subject very much longer, don’t you?” Connor whispered.
I nodded and gave him another kiss on the cheek. “Got to take advantage of that little trick as long as I can.”
“Yuck! Y’all ain’t ’posed to do that in the store,” Grace fussed.
“Yes, ma’am,” Connor said and then leaned over and whispered for my ears only, “If we do have another boy, I agree on the name Davis. Maybe we can rewrite history a little bit, and they’ll all grow up with no secrets.”
I don’t think about the big secret very often anymore, but the idea of it is still alive and well in Atascosa County. Pretty often someone will make a comment or ask me about it, and my answer has always been the same: Aunt Gracie didn’t tell me anything.