The Sweet By and By

by Sara Evans

  “Wait.” Jade rolled back to the desk and slapped her hand over Lillabeth’s as she retreated with fifty cents. “Heads or tails?”

  “What?”

  “Call it. Quick.” With a flick of her thumb, Jade launched the coin high in the air. “Heads or tails?”

  “Heads, no . . . tails. Tails.”

  The coin rotated in midair, a silver glint slicing through warm afternoon sunlight, then fell to the floor, landing on its narrow edging with a ping, and rolled across the floor. Jade and Lillabeth hunched over and followed it until the quarter hit a crack in the floorboards and disappeared.

  “Ack.” Jade dropped to her knees and slapped the floor with her palm, then thunked her forehead against the wood to peer through the dark slit. “Get me a flashlight, Lilla. I want to see if it’s heads or tails.”

  “You’ve gone crazy, Jade. What are you trying to decide?”

  “If I should dye my hair pink for the wedding.” Jade held up her hand, wiggling her fingers.

  “Liar.” Lillabeth snatched the flashlight from the leaning bookshelf and slapped it into Jade’s palm. “Pink’s not vintage.”

  “I do have more than one string on my violin, Lilla. I play contemporary now and then.” Shining the round beam through the narrow slit, Jade tried to see how the coin had landed, but she couldn’t even find it, let alone discover if it was heads or tails.

  “Contemporary, maybe, but not 1999 punk. Too tacky. Dark brown hair suits you fine.”

  Jade sat back with a heavy exhale. “There goes twenty-five cents and the answer to my problem.”

  “Is this about the invitation? Jade, you have the answer.” Lillabeth tapped her chest. “In your heart.”

  “Don’t you have work to do in the storeroom?” Jade returned the flashlight to the shelf.

  “Hey, you asked me. Heads or tails. Remember? I just came in for soda money.” Lillabeth rubbed her two quarters together. “For what it’s worth, I think you should send it. I mean, unless you’re inviting an ex-lover or something. Or an ax murderer.”

  “Can I pretend she’s an ax murderer?” Jade plopped onto her chair and stared out the window. The trash guys forgot to empty the Dumpster again.

  “Who is this horrible person?”

  “Someone.” Raking her hair back from her face, Jade dug around her soul for a thimble’s worth of emotion that might tell her what to do.

  “Ah, the elusive someone.” Lillabeth lowered herself into the rickety metal chair. “Hey, Jade, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure. What?” Jade drummed her fingers over the invitation. If she sent it, the issues of her life she’d carefully dubbed “unusable vintage” would recycle through her heart and resurrect all kinds of ugliness. Liz Carlton’s great-great-granny’s moth-eaten sweaters had nothing on Jade’s tattered past.

  The teen inhaled long and slow, tapping the edge of one quarter against the face of the other. Jade watched her, slipping the invitation onto the desk.

  “Must be hard to talk about. Usually I can’t get you to shut up.” Jade smiled and kicked the air in front of Lillabeth.

  “Yeah, well”—big exhale—“let’s say you did something you didn’t mean to do and the result—”

  “Good afternoon, ladies.” A svelte, tan June Benson, outfitted for golf, swooshed into the office with a wide smile and grand gestures. “Lillabeth, goodness, how are you? I didn’t see your mother on the tennis courts all summer. Here it is fall. Tell her we could use her on the golf course. We’re missing a fourth.”

  “She’s into Pilates these days.” Lillabeth held up her quarters and motioned she was going back to work.

  “Take me with you . . . ,” Jade called after her, then laughed for June’s sake, but the woman was focused on the invitations.

  “As I suspected. These lovely”—June patted the box of invitations—“unique . . . very red invitations are still here. We can say one thing: the envelopes will stand out in the mail. So what do you say we mail them, hm? Time is running out, Jade. Please let me take them. Except your mother’s. You can keep that one until you decide.”

  “I haven’t told her yet.” Jade wadded up the lime-green sticky note. Mail invitations.

  “Then call her. Land sakes, you’re a grown woman.” June collapsed in the metal chair Lillabeth had just vacated, catching herself when it listed to starboard. “What will people think if your mother is not at your wedding?”

  “That I’m wise and gutsy.”

  June straightened the hem of her madras golf skort. “Or petty and childish.”

  Roscoe peeked out from under the desk, his eyebrows twitching as he scanned the space between Jade and June. Ladies, keep it down. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  “If you’d let Max and me get married in a small ceremony up on Eventide Ridge at dusk like we wanted—”

  “And have my only child married without a proper ceremony?” June propped her hand on the edge of the desk and leaned toward Jade. “No ma’am. And you’d regret it, too, in time. Trust me.”

  Jade matched her future mother-in-law’s hard gaze. “Trust me. I wouldn’t.”

  “Send the invitation, Jade, because these”—June rose, switching her handbag from one shoulder to the other and tucking the box of invitations under her arm—“are going out whether you’re ready or not. I’m sorry, but time is running out. I don’t mean to be so bossy . . . goodness, I can’t imagine what angst exists between you and your mama. Were you abused? Pardon my frankness.”

  “No.”

  “My granny, bless her soul, used to say, ‘Whatever ill you have against someone isn’t worth sending the Lord Jesus back to the cross.’”

  “I don’t even know what that means.” Jade faced her computer screen and clicked on an unread e-mail. “But I’m not sending Jesus anywhere.”

  “It means Jesus’ love and forgiveness is sufficient for any wrong or violation done to us, Jade. Don’t you think it’s powerful enough for you and your mama? This I do know”—June stood just beyond Jade’s peripheral vision— “you need to forgive your mother for whatever it is that she did to you.” She paused. “Believe me, holding a grudge does nothing but deepen and widen your hurt.”

  “I appreciate your input, June, but forgiveness has a twin: forgetting.” Jade waved Mama’s invitation in the air. “Which is what I’m trying to do.”

  The only way she figured she’d come close to forgiving was to forget her past, which included her mama.

  “I won’t argue with you. You know your own heart better than I do, but I wish you’d reconsider.” June pressed her hand gently on Jade’s shoulder. “See you at seven? Diamond Joe’s, meeting with the wedding planner?” She leaned to peer at Jade’s to-do list. “I declare, I don’t know how you run a business this way.”

  “My system works for me.” Jade rolled her chair away from the desk, giving June a good-bye, have a nice afternoon smile. “See you at seven.”

  “What’s this?” June invaded “the system” and snatched up a sticky note. “A prescription for Max?”

  Nosy. Jade took the note from her. “You have my wedding invitations; now you want my sticky notes too?”

  “What’s wrong with Max?”

  “His back is out again, and the doctor called in a prescription to the pharmacy up here. He asked me to pick it up.”

  “I didn’t know he hurt his back. What’d he do?” June snatched the sticky note from Jade, her expression drawn, her tone laced with concern. She seemed a bit ruffled.

  “Sneezed wrong or something. It just happened yesterday.”

  “His back’s been a mess since high school football and track.” June stuffed the sticky into her bag. “I’ve got to run by the pharmacy anyway. I’ll pick this up for him. You’re so swamped here.”

  “June, I’m not that swamped.”

  “Well, like I said, I’m on my way to the pharmacy anyway. See you at seven.”

  And June was gone.

  Okay, then. Thanks. Despite June�
��s overreaching into Jade and Max’s wedding plans, and, well, most everything around Whisper Hollow, the Bensons were good people. Floured with Southern charm and tradition and deep fried, June and Rebel were Whisper Hollow pillars. Both sets of Max’s grandparents were descendants of the town’s founders.

  Her people, on the other hand . . . a dad she hadn’t heard from in years, and a flower-child mother stuck in the dried-up soil of the ’60s.

  Jade knocked off her clogs and dug her toes into Roscoe’s warm, thick fur. He sighed and kissed her ankle with a lick. Her vision of her wedding had been a handful of friends and family gathered around as she and Max pledged themselves to each other in a peaceful, solemn, simple ceremony. Jade had never imagined she’d find true love again. But Max had captured her heart.

  Why should she invite the one woman who could destroy it all?

  Two

  Amber hues muted the last of the Iowa blue day as the sun rounded the horizon toward the west, taking with it the last bit of warmth. An icy breeze nipped Beryl’s face as she fumbled for her house keys, her arms loaded with mail and groceries, a pack of hungry dogs swirling around her feet, panting and yipping, splashing drool on her shoes.

  “Willow?” That girl, where’d she run off to today? “Willloooow?”

  Between the doctor’s appointment, the aggravating man in front of her at Prairie City Foods—who paid his fifty-dollar tab in quarters—and the crowding of her daughter’s mangy mutts, Beryl was fresh out of straws.

  Willow, please suddenly appear. Open the door. Help me inside. Beryl’s arms were starting to tremble from balancing her bags. And she craved a cigarette. Her mind’s eye pictured the pack she had stashed in the back of the pantry.

  Dr. Meadows had demanded she quit, but right now, he could stuff his no-smoking advice. Beryl would smoke him right along with her Virginia Slims.

  “Willow!” As she stretched to slip her key into the lock, Beryl’s packages crashed to the gray porch boards. Her key slipped from her fingers.

  She swore and kicked at the mail. A slick ad for cheap pizza sailed over the yard. Pepper, the little Jack Russell, bounded after it, yipping and snapping.

  The remaining dogs watched with heads tilted and tails wagging. “Yes, she’s one of you,” Beryl said. “Embarrassing, isn’t it?”

  Stooping to retrieve her keys, purple and brown spots swirled before her eyes and she stumbled forward as a ringing sounded in her ears. “Mercy . . .” Beryl drew a deep breath, sitting and propping her back against the kitchen door.

  Sooner or later Willow would come along. Not to check on her mother, but to feed her dogs.

  Pepper returned with the pizza ad, wrinkled and frayed, sticking out both sides of her jaw. She dropped it on Beryl’s lap.

  “Thank you, Pepper. Now, if you could, please open the door.”

  The dog sat, panting, grinning. Beryl lifted her hand to brush the pooch’s head. The wind had swept away the warmth of the afternoon and a fall chill seeped beneath her skin, but Beryl couldn’t motivate her old, tired bones to move. When did fifty-nine start to feel like a hundred and nine?

  “Beryl, what the heck?”

  Willow stood on the bottom step eating a red apple, her T-shirt askew and her hair tousled. Next to her stood Lincoln, Beryl’s occasional handyman. A long, yellow piece of straw stuck out from the side of his head, and he was smiling to beat the band.

  Darn it, Willow. Leave the help alone.

  “Your stupid dogs knocked me over.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Willow wedged the apple between her teeth and offered her mother a hand. Lincoln steadied Beryl once she got on her feet.

  “I did. But you were”—she looked at Lincoln as she unlocked the kitchen door—“busy. How about teaching your canines a few manners?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Willow took a final bite of her apple and tossed it into the yard. “Read to them from Emily Post tonight or something.”

  “Oh, please, not Emily Post.” Beryl gathered her purse and one of the grocery bags. Every joint ached. “Bring in the mail and groceries for me, Willow, please. Lincoln, how about seeing to the busted porch screens I’ve already paid you to repair. Maybe I can enjoy a few nights of fall before winter drives me inside.”

  “I’m on it right now, Mrs. Hill.”

  In the boxy, warm kitchen, Beryl dropped her things onto the red, cracked-ice Formica and chrome table, an antique from her childhood, and snatched up the teakettle. She hankered for a hot cup of sweet tea. Then a cigarette. Yes sir, tea and a cigarette.

  Still outside on the porch, Willow laughed low to the rhythm of shuffling feet. Lincoln responded in a deep, muffled tone.

  “I’m not paying you to make out with Willow, Linc.” Beryl called as she stuck the kettle under the faucet and cranked the water.

  “Leave him alone. He’s not robbing your paid time.” She dropped her armload of packages to the kitchen table. The canned beans tumbled from the plastic sack and rolled to the edge.

  “Willow, please don’t ding the table.” Beryl could still see Paps’ face the night he brought the table home to surprise Mother. The summer of ’56. Or was it ’57? Elvis had been on the Steve Allen Show that night.

  “I didn’t ding the table.” Willow stacked cans in the center. “I’m going to help Lincoln.”

  “He don’t need your kind of help. I want my screens fixed.” Beryl fired up the burner under the kettle, thinking she’d best put the groceries away while she had the energy. Sliding the mail away from the table’s edge, she reached for the bean cans. “It’s not like me to tell you who to be with, Willow, but at least let him take you to dinner first.”

  “Dinner? This is a fling, Mama. No big deal.” Willow swung open the pantry doors, searching. “If I let him take me on a date, he might start thinking I’m his girlfriend.”

  “Heaven forbid. Does Linc know it’s just a fling?” Beryl shoved Willow aside and set the cans on the middle shelf, then turned to the table for the bread, spaghetti, cereal, and two-liter of pop.

  Willow shrugged, taking the pop bottle from her mother and setting it on the pantry floor. “If he doesn’t, he will soon enough.”

  “Do what you will, but be honest.” Beryl retrieved her favorite teacup—a gold-rimmed Lennox with holly leaves—from the cupboard, then stared out the window by the sink, waiting for the water to boil.

  Tank Victor’s harvested field ran along the hem of the fading-green backyard like a pleated, coffee-colored skirt.

  This view always took her back to the summer of ’67. She’d been standing by the same field when Mother agreed to let her spend the summer in San Francisco with her college-age cousin, Carolyn. Mother’s reluctant yes dropped Beryl into the heart of the Summer of Love, an inaugural member of the counterculture that permanently inked her life.

  “You miss it?” Willow fell against the counter next to Beryl, peeling cellophane away from a Twinkie.

  “Depends. Miss what?”

  “Farming.”

  “No, not really. I’m not sure you can call three seasons of corn planting ‘farming.’ I did like driving the tractor. Actually, I was thinking about my first summer in California.”

  “The year of the hippie. Paps had to drive out to San Francisco to bring you home for your senior year.” Willow stuffed half the Twinkie in her mouth and tossed the wrapper in the bin under the sink.

  “So you’ve heard the story. Sorry to bore you.” Beryl glanced over. “How can you eat those things?”

  “You were an original wild child, weren’t you, Beryl?” Willow munched on the second half of the Twinkie, dusting her hands against her jeans.

  “Not wild. Free. Different from Mother and Paps. They were so square-thinking and backward.”

  “Compared to you, maybe, but it doesn’t mean they were wrong, Beryl.”

  “I thought you were going to help Lincoln.” Beryl reached for the ceramic blue canister and lifted the lid for an English Breakfast tea bag.


  “You told me to leave him alone.”

  “Now I want you to leave me alone.”

  “I called you at work today.” Willow didn’t leave but remained propped against the counter, picking at the jagged edge of her broken thumbnail. “They said you were on leave or something.”

  Nosy little girl. “I’m taking some vacation, getting some things done that I needed done.” Beryl scooped sugar into her teacup, two teaspoons tonight instead of one—hot tea was no good unless it was sweet—and resituated the ancient art deco napkin holder Mother owned when Eisenhower was a mere general.

  “What things?” Willow opened the kitchen’s junk drawer and picked around the pens, pencils, bread ties, glue, safety pins, and what all.

  She was fishing in the pond of none-of-her-business. “I’m a senior teamster, Willow, and your mother—even if you do call me Beryl—and I don’t have to answer to you.” The kettle started a slow steam. “What are you looking for in that drawer?”

  “A nail file.”

  Beryl stepped beside Willow and dug to the back of the junk. “Here.” She cut the air with a well-worn but sufficient emery board. “Ask Lincoln to chop some wood before he goes home tonight. I might like a fire.” Lately, she craved the simple, homey things she’d once found confining and antiquated.

  “Yeah, okay.” Willow filed her nail and dropped the board back into the drawer, then reached for the mail. “Is everything okay, Beryl? You seem edgy these days. More than usual.”

  “I’m fine.” Beryl snapped off the burner under the kettle and filled her cup.

  “Can’t a woman take a few days off without the third degree? My stars—”

  “Whoa, she actually sent it.”

  “Whoa, what?” Beryl stirred as she carried her cup to the table, her rattled nerves calming. She didn’t want Willow to know. Not yet. There was time.

  Standing by the table, Willow stared at a ridiculously red envelope. “Good for her.”

  “Good for who, girl? What are you yammering about? Is that a Christmas card already? It’s only the first of October.”

  “Uh, I’m going to see if Lincoln is ready for dinner.” Willow tossed the envelope to the table. It landed in front of Beryl.