“I’m trying not to call him that.”
“He’s my brother-in-law, and I can call him what I want. ‘A rose by any other name,’ right?”
At that moment, nothing about this smelled sweet to Maxine. The situation reeked, fishier than the Bradford pear trees that bloomed every few yards. “Did he move back to punish me?”
As Evelyn peered into the distance, her eyes seemed to seek an answer that ducked and dodged. “No, he did not. But shame on us, Maxine. Shame on us! That girl has been calling me Auntie Evelyn all her life because you and I are best friends and she doesn’t know I’m her real Aunt Evelyn. That my husband is really Uncle Kevin, not Mr. Kevin. And more importantly, of course, that you’re her mother. I mean . . . Maxine.”
Evelyn bounced the baby. “My Granny B toted around a secret almost all her days, and it drained the life out of her, out of the relationships with my aunts and uncles—and with me nearly. And you know what almost happened to Kevin and me.”
Evelyn shook her head as if rebuking her husband. Or maybe to clear away a memory. Then she focused on Maxine, who was full of present woes. “That’s what living a lie does. It affects generations. I’m not going to let that happen to this baby—or any other baby. Maybe you should be grateful JD came back and all this is coming out. How did you think you’d be able to live with this? I can’t believe you’ve kept it secret all this time.”
“Be grateful? You sound like First John! And nothing is ‘coming out.’ How can I tell her now, at thirteen? It gets harder and harder every day. JD legally gave up his rights to her, so technically he’s no longer her father. I’m no longer her mother. We were too ill-equipped to raise a child, and I did what was best for her.”
“But now, do you think you did it in the best way?” Evelyn rocked slowly side to side, moving her hand in circles on Lauren’s back.
“What about now? You think I should disrupt Celeste’s life because JD is all grown-up and regrets his decision and I’m getting married?”
“I don’t know if it’s regret as much as maturity. You’re right. He was young and self-centered. And don’t get me started on his mama, bless her heart. Mrs. Lester had her nose too high in the air. She still worries about appearances, even in the state she’s in.”
Maxine tilted her head back so that the weak sunlight peeking through the clouds wouldn’t have to search for her face.
“I know Granny B warned me about sticking my nose in other folks’ business, but how do you feel, Maxine? I sense your own struggle, and it has nothing to do with JD’s return. You said you were meeting with Theodore to talk to him about it. Why, if the matter is said and done?”
“Because we’re getting married. Didn’t you just say that husbands and wives should share everything?” Maxine crossed her arms and leaned back, uncaring of the water soaking into her coat and pants.
Evelyn squeezed her hand. “So should mothers and daughters.”
“Well, Celeste has a mother, and they do share everything. She has a father, too. JD wants to have a relationship with his long-lost daughter, but guess what? She’s not lost. She’s been here all the time.”
Evelyn sat back then and wrapped her arms around Lauren.
Maxine sighed. “Maybe he came back to lay some type of claim on us . . . on her . . . but I’m not that person anymore, Evelyn. That girl who cut class. Who sneaked out of her parents’ house to party. Who fell in love with a mysterious, cute guy and ran away from home. The person who gave up her daughter. That’s not me. But that’s who JD expects me to be.”
“But you are that person, Maxine. That same woman who’s sitting in front of me now, in her gray slacks and striped blouse and glasses, with her hair slicked back, wearing the cute red boots—that’s the girl who once loved to skate on Monday nights in her Daisy Dukes and tube tops with her hair flying everywhere. I know, because I was skating beside you.
“You had a baby. Okay. I left my husband. Big whoop. Sure, those are huge, but my temper and your pregnancy don’t make us terrible people in God’s eyes. They make us who we are, part of the forgiven. The people He loves and who He died for. Our pasts make us who Kevin and Teddy—and yes, JD probably—love, too. They expect us to be just who we are. You can slap some paint on a house and make it all open concept inside, but it’s still a house. Granny B proved that to me.”
“Are you saying a person can’t change?”
“Anybody can change. We’re supposed to. But the past is another story, Maxine. JD is working on what he can change. He left that high-paying law firm in New York to head up a nonprofit in his hometown and help his mother because he’s not the same boy who was all about gettin’ his. No, he’s not perfect. He hasn’t thought this through, all the implications of returning here. What it will mean to Celeste. I think he’s seeking reconciliation. Forgiveness.”
“By causing more pain, more brokenness? This wholeness—it’s not mine to give, Evelyn. And it’s not ours to take away from Celeste. It’s too late.” Maxine’s tears mixed with the mist from a passing cloud. “And how do you know this anyway?”
“You must have forgotten. Telling Kevin is the same as telling me.” Evelyn opened her umbrella and held it over them.
“And is telling you the same as telling Kevin? And telling JD?”
“Well, I can tell you that baring your heart to all your faceless readers isn’t the same as talking to the people who know and love you. Do you not trust us with yourself?”
Evelyn smiled and rubbed Maxine’s shoulder in the silence. “I’ll let you chew on this without my voice yammering away at you. I need to meet Mama anyway. She’d have a fit if she knew I had the baby out in this weather.” She rose. “Have you talked to JD?”
Maxine stood slowly. “A little.”
“Well, it sounds like you need to talk to him a lot.” She embraced Maxine before she jumped back, exclaiming, “Oops, sorry, Lauren!” She made soothing noises over the squirming baby. “Pray about it, and then reach out to JD, Maxine. He’ll be able to explain himself better than I can. Love you. We’ll talk more later.”
Afraid of that very thing, Maxine watched Evelyn look left, right, left, and then dart across the street toward the parking lot beside the glass-and-brick library. Frowning, Maxine opened her umbrella against the sprinkles forming bigger raindrops and gathering speed and splashed back toward her car.
Chapter Fourteen
THE DAYS INCHED BY WITHOUT TEDDY. Every second he was away felt like a nerve-racking stay of execution, a delay of the inevitable guillotine that was sure to drop. Like a teenager sneaking phone calls in the middle of the night, Maxine snuggled against her bed pillows and craned to hear Teddy describe his time in Louisiana with his parents. She thanked God for the news that Franklin was in good physical health, but she couldn’t help but fret over the man’s impact on her love life.
Her Life & Times editor seemed to think her personal pain directly correlated to her professional gain. At the end of their Saturday morning staff meeting, the editor propped her elbows on her desk and nodded at Maxine. “Keep it coming, all this angst. Your column is generating lots of buzz for the magazine. But stop cutting it so close to the deadline. You’re giving me gray hairs.” Jean ran her fingertips through the inch-long shock of white hair she kept slicked back from her round face.
But Maxine was only half-listening. She pictured her editor as she’d looked in last night’s dream, dressed in a tailored, blush-pink suit, with a large white gardenia tucked behind her left ear—a far cry from the distressed denims and blazer she typically wore to work. Maxine struggled to untangle herself from the tendrils of what seemed a nightmare in the light of day. It clung to her as she feigned interest in the discussion around the conference table.
Maxine was all decked out in her wedding finery as she peeked through the diamond-shaped pane in the door. Each pew was filled to overflowing with well-dressed guests. A votive candle in a crystal holder sprouted from the tub of chrysanthemums blooming at each ro
w, setting the church a-flicker with candlelight. Flower arrangements in the windowsills complemented the greens and golds of the stained glass. Maxine gripped her bouquet and turned to her escort as the last bridesmaid stepped into place at the altar. “I’m ready,” she breathed.
At her words, the double doors whispered open and all the congregants turned to behold the bride. Is that Granny B? Look at Granddaddy in his tuxedo! Why won’t the twins stand still? She turned to her left, expecting to see First John in coat and tails, but instead a tall man in a wet suit extended an arm. “Let’s go,” he managed to offer around his snorkel and mask. Reluctantly Maxine took his neoprene-covered arm.
As she put a white satin-tipped toe on the carpeted center aisle, she turned to smile at Jean and her gardenia, but the candle at the end of the row blew out. She moved to the next row, and again, a sudden breeze snuffed out the flame, and the ensuing darkness obscured the guests from view. Her escort uttered nary a word as they marched inexorably toward the altar. When Maxine tried to hang back, to discern familiar faces in the shadows, he dragged her forward.
By the time she landed at the front, the inky unknown had swallowed up the entire church. Only the attendants remained, three on one side and three on the other. She turned to hand her bouquet to Celeste, but her maid of honor disappeared in a poof, followed by Evelyn.
“What’s happening?” she cried, reaching for Teddy. Her hand grasped nothing but air. She was alone, save for the man in the wet suit who now faced her at the altar, holding a Bible. “Where’s everyone? Where did they all go? Teddy!”
Still holding open the Bible with one hand, the mysterious man used his other to reach under his mask and remove his snorkel. He read, “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.”
Maxine snapped to attention as everyone gathered files and stood. She scooped up her materials, nodded good-bye to her editor, followed the others from the room, and wove through the cubicles toward the exit. Fed up with the pain and suffering related to the wedding hullabaloo, she dug out her phone and tapped out the ten digits she knew so well.
Maxine smiled when she heard the raspy voice on the other line. “Hey, dear! May I come over?”
________
Time had abandoned Ruby and Lerenzo’s hometown. The only nod to its passage was a Walmart Supercenter that had erupted on an old cornfield, right past the sign that read Spring Hope City Limits. Three stoplights broke up Main Street’s amble through a place where people ate fried pork chop dinners at the Skillet, shopped for nail polish and wigs at Peggy’s, and bought liver pudding and mother of vinegar at the Piggly Wiggly.
Maxine’s tires kicked off pebbles as they crunched on one of the side roads, passing large craftsman-style houses families had been handing down for generations. Only a rare soul blindly put a finger on the map and opted to make Spring Hope home. Dirt-covered offshoots wiggled between squat one-story houses, fields, woods, vine-covered abandoned cottages, and knee-high weeds littering yards that had given up the fight to survive.
She had spent nearly two years in her grandparents’ historic farmhouse, splitting her time between their kitchen and the front room at Granny B’s, two streets over on Carrot Lane. Both Ruby and Beatrice, one related to Maxine by blood, the other by spirit, had plied her with fried fish, fresh corn, sweet tea, stories, prayer, and wisdom. Maxine sighed as she turned onto the gravel drive and pulled behind the house. She was starving.
“Hey there! You just missed Roy. Where you been keepin’ yourself?” Mama Ruby—tall, solid, softhearted—enveloped Maxine the minute she slammed her car door.
She rose up on her toes to wrap her arms around her grandma’s neck.
After a moment, Ruby pulled back and held Maxine at arm’s length. “What’s the matter, child?”
“I’ve just missed you and Granddaddy.”
After peering at her a second or two longer, her grandma’s chocolaty hand wrapped around Maxine’s, and they worked their way toward the wide steps. As they walked, Mama Ruby pointed out the flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees growing out back.
Maxine tsked-tsked about the rabbits nibbling on the squash and the stink bugs attacking the tomato vines. She nodded at talk of the fresh corn, blueberry bushes, and the pies and cobblers planned for the summer. By the time they clambered up to the side porch and opened the screen door, she had caught enough bits and pieces about planting to make up for all the meatier chunks of the conversation she had missed. Maxine already felt better, and the smells wafting from the kitchen soothed all her hurt feelings.
“Mmmm. Is that—?”
“Banana pudding.” She crooked a finger toward the double ovens. Like Vivienne, Ruby had transformed her kitchen into a chef’s paradise, the only updated space in the house.
“Can I help you with anything?”
“Only with eatin’ it. And ignore Lerenzo’s mess. Since we already had all the ingredients to make his pork roast with you and Theodore, we decided to go on ahead with it.” Mama Ruby waved at the oregano, garlic, orange, and lime on the countertop. She moved the bottle of cooking sherry and set out utensils.
“God must have told you I was coming.” Maxine found a seat.
Mama Ruby took the pudding from the oven and set it on the counter. It was a concoction of flour, eggs, heavy cream, and vanilla extract that she stirred for nearly thirty minutes before she layered it between cookies and bananas. Then she baked it to brown the meringue. Ruby dug into the topping and delivered a heaping bowlful to the table. “I was keepin’ it warm in the oven until I was ready for it. You know I like to eat my dessert first ’cause I might not live long enough to eat it last.”
Maxine waited until her grandma had her own serving before biting into a softened vanilla wafer. “This is yummy. I don’t know why everybody else likes their pudding cold when they could eat this. And just what I need to warm up.”
“Warm up? It’s not chilly out there. What’s ailin’ you?”
Maxine ruminated on her answer.
The back door opened and slapped shut behind a man with gold-kissed skin. His salt-and-pepper shoulder-length waves were pulled back in a leather hair tie, so nothing hid the creases on his cheeks and forehead, gifts from years in the sun.
“Granddaddy!” She dropped her spoon in her half-empty bowl and trotted over to him.
Lerenzo’s slight build didn’t prevent him from rearing back and lifting his granddaughter’s feet off the ground. As a boy, he had toiled in Cuba’s sugarcane fields alongside his parents before they spirited him away to the United States. By the time he was twenty-five, he had traveled from Florida to North Carolina and was topping corn in the fields edging Spring Hope. A few decades later, he was planting and harvesting crops on his own farmland, and at seventy-five, he was running Manna Catering and getting paid to cook what his family produced—the sequel to his hardworking success story.
“Ah . . . preciosa. Cómo estás?”
“Hmm . . .” Maxine shrugged. “No importa.”
“It’s important if it’s somethin’ to do with you.” Mama Ruby offered her two cents around a mouthful of wafers.
Maxine patted her grandfather’s hand as they got comfortable at the table big enough to hold six salsa dancers. “Have some banana pudding with Mama Ruby and me, and we can talk about it.”
Lerenzo eyed her before he sighed and accepted a steaming bowl.
Maxine watched him enjoy his first spoonful before she took a deep breath. “JD moved back.” They knew all about Celeste’s birth, so she made short work of her tale. The end.
Lerenzo pushed away his nearly full bowl. “Will you talk to him?”
Perhaps his soft accent made his question somewhat more palatable. Maxine actually considered the possibility this time instead of rejecting it outright. “What do you think I should do, Granddaddy?”
He glanced at Ruby. Then he ran a gnarled index finger along the rim of his glass dish. “You know, mi nieta preciosa . . .”
Maxine smiled a little as
his voice faded. She didn’t feel like his “precious granddaughter” with the enormity of her burden.
“I was never able to introduce you to your bisabuelos, but oh, if you could have traveled to Cuba to meet them! The stories they could’ve told you about tu abuelo. Ah . . .” He and his wife chuckled together. “Recuerdas cuando me caí en la letrina de mi papá?”
“La letrina . . . outhouse . . . remember when you fell in the outhouse?” Maxine stared at her grandparents, openmouthed. “What? Why? When?”
“I was four, maybe five. Old enough to remember.”
“Like you could forget that smell.” Mama Ruby’s nose wrinkled. “Girl, when your grandfather told me that story, I liked to fell over myself. I didn’t want to kiss him for a week, all those years later!”
“Mmm-mwah!” Lerenzo sat back, pleased with himself after grabbing his wife’s face with both hands and planting a wet kiss on her lips. He gave her another smooch before he turned back to his granddaughter and his story. “I was a little rascal in those days.”
“You’re still a little rascal.”
“Hush, woman,” he growled. “Pero es la verdad. And it was true then, too. My brothers never could keep up with me. That day, when I got away from them, I ran into the outhouse to hide, and I fell into that dirty hole. Whew-wee! They wore me out.”
“My great-grandparents? Mis bisabuelos?”
“No. Mis hermanos! My brothers had to clean me up. And when they did, whew. Believe me, that was the last time I played that dirty trick.” He laughed out loud, obviously still relishing the memory, as offensive as it was to the senses. “And you know who reminds me now of me then?”
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