The Lilac Bouquet

by Carolyn Brown

  Oma Lynn poked her head around the door in the middle of the morning. “Snacks on the patio or in your office?”

  It couldn’t be midmorning already. Seth glanced at his watch and then at the stack of papers that he hadn’t touched. “Patio today. It’s too pretty a day to waste by stayin’ inside.”

  “Reminds me of the cool mornings when Mama would make us go pick the green beans,” Oma Lynn said. “I loved fresh green beans cooked with bacon and new potatoes, though I did not like to pick beans or to snap them, either. Emmy Jo, can you come on inside and help me carry out the popcorn and hot chocolate?”

  Seth could almost taste the smoky flavor of a pot of green beans with a big hunk of his mother’s warm corn bread to sop up the pot liquor. He would have to remember to put that on the menu for the next month.

  Emmy Jo laid aside the paper. “I cannot believe how people air their dirty laundry in a public newspaper. I’ve been looking at the old papers, and they had advice columns in them but they weren’t like this.”

  “There were more restrictions on what a person could put in a paper back then. Besides, most of us were more concerned with having enough to eat.” Oma Lynn was still rattling on about the Depression as Seth went back to his paper, but still not one headline caught his attention. He laid it aside and watched a robin gather dead leaves and small sticks to build a nest.

  “Enjoy your baby birds,” Seth muttered. “Some of us never get the privilege of having a family of our own.”

  “What was that?” Emmy Jo said at his elbow as she sat a big crock of hot buttered popcorn on the table. “Were you talking to me?” She filled an oversize mug with hot chocolate and handed it to him.

  “No, I was talking to myself,” he said.

  Emmy Jo picked up the hot chocolate and held it in her hands. “That’s a sign that you are getting old or crazy.”

  “I’m already old, and the crazy part is debatable if you ask folks in town,” he said.

  “You are only as old as you let yourself be, and that means you’ll always be young.” Emmy Jo sipped the hot chocolate. “This is really good. Homemade, right? It tastes like what Granny makes. Diana and I hated that instant crap after we’d had the good stuff. When we were in high school, we’d talk Libby into making us a cup like this after evening cleanup at the café.”

  “Jeff.” He nodded.

  “What? Who is Jeff? Is that a fancy chocolate or something?”

  “I used to come in there to get a carryout meal when Libby had fish night. The tall waitress with the brown hair was Jeff. You were Mutt,” he said.

  “Oh, now I get it—that old cartoon thing.” Emmy Jo smiled. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I was only in there five minutes. Got my order and got out,” Seth said.

  “Well, you should’ve stuck around and had some hot chocolate. It tasted like this,” Emmy Jo said.

  “We had popcorn and hot chocolate for supper on Sunday nights,” Seth said wistfully. The aroma of warm butter always brought on a vision of his mother shaking her biggest pot over the old gas stove so the popcorn wouldn’t stick. “Mama said that’s what they had when she was growing up, because her adopted dad had to preach and he didn’t want anything heavy on his stomach before services.”

  “Which church?” Emmy Jo asked.

  Lord, have mercy! This girl could ask more questions than anyone he’d ever known. “We didn’t attend church. Mama gathered us all around in the living room and told us Bible stories.”

  “Even when you were a teenager?” she asked.

  “Yes, even when I was a teenager. When Mama died I was barely eighteen, and Nora was seventeen. She and Walter got married the day after we buried Mama, and he took her and my younger brother, Matthew, to Amarillo, where Walter owned an oil company along with his father. Matthew was only ten that year.”

  “How old was Walter?”

  “Twenty, but his granddad had seen a future in oil back in the boom days and made a fortune. When Walter graduated high school, the grandfather retired and gave the company to him and his father jointly.”

  Emmy Jo whistled through her teeth. “I can’t imagine having that kind of luck fall into my lap.”

  “Neither could Nora, but she married him for love. He was a good man and they finished raising Matthew, plus they had three of their own.”

  “It must have been wonderful to have siblings.” Emmy Jo sighed. “I always envied the kids that had a brother or a sister.”

  He wished he could pull a sister from thin air and give it to her. Too bad Nora was past eighty, or he’d offer to share her with Emmy Jo.

  “And while they were fightin’ and fussin’, they probably were jealous of you because you didn’t have to share anything,” he said.

  “I never thought of that. Bless Nora’s heart, though. Being so young and taking on the raisin’ of her younger brother,” Emmy Jo said.

  “Nora was always older than her years.” A vision flashed into his mind of the day that he’d gotten on the bus to leave for basic training and waved good-bye to the family. Matthew had been so excited to be going to a new place. The bus and the 1952 Ford pulled away from Hickory at the same time, leaving their mother’s fresh grave behind.

  “Where is Matthew now? Amarillo?” Emmy Jo asked. She hadn’t run across his name in any of the research she’d done.

  “Matthew was planning to make a career of the army, but he died in a training session when he was only twenty. Nora insisted on burying him in Amarillo, and in those days—well, it seemed like the right thing to do.”

  Emmy Jo’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry. She takes care of him and you take care of Mary. That is so sweet.”

  “Thank you.” He swallowed hard to get the lump in his throat to go away as he remembered the military funeral. Those were sad days, but nothing compared to the day he’d had to stand beside his mother’s plot as they buried her.

  When they’d finished their chocolate, Emmy Jo filled the two empty mugs with coffee and sipped at hers. Anyone who could drink coffee as strong as he liked it and not even wince was a good kid—even if she was nosy.

  “I wonder why Mary fell in love with your dad,” she said after several minutes of silence.

  “She didn’t.” He wished he could take the words back the moment they left his mouth, because they’d bring on more questions.

  Emmy Jo sat up straighter and set her mug on the table. She was four feet away, facing him when he looked her way. “Are you going to explain?”

  “Might as well, or you’ll hound me until I drop dead,” he said. “Remember the story of the wagon overturning?”

  It was that instant flash of a smile as well as the sarcasm that reminded him so much of Nora when she was that age. Telling Emmy Jo things was like talking to Nora when they were teenagers and shared everything.

  “Samuel Thomas, my dad, was about five years old that day. His parents had gone down to Beaumont to see about some kind of job in the oil well boom and left him with his grandparents,” he said. “Mama never knew this, at least not while she was alive.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “When Daddy left us, I was sixteen. He put a letter under my pillow explaining the way things happened and the way he felt. I could never bring myself to tell her, and looking back I imagine it was the most difficult thing he ever felt compelled to write.” Sadness filled Seth’s heart, and he felt a twinge of the same nausea that he’d had the day he took the letter to the woods to read it.

  “Do you still have the letter?”

  “Yes, and it’s locked away in a safe with everything else that I’ve uncovered about my family. Do you want to hear this or not?” he snapped.

  She clamped her mouth shut and bobbed her head a couple of times.

  He picked up his coffee and drank several sips, getting his thoughts all together before he started again. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly as the words on the letter came back to his mind.

  H
e’d found it early on a Saturday morning and recognized his father’s tight handwriting when he opened the five pages. The first words said that the letter was only for his eyes, because Samuel felt that he owed him an explanation. Tucked into his shirt, close to his side, it had practically burned a hole in his skin at the breakfast table.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Nora had asked.

  “He didn’t come home last night,” Mary had answered. “I expect he worked all night unloading feed down at the store. They get a shipment in on Friday evenings some time. He’ll be here in a little while, and we’ll have to be quiet so he can rest.”

  Seth shut his eyes some sixty-six years later and could smell the warm biscuits that Mary took from the oven that horrible morning. She’d set them in the middle of the table along with a bowl of sausage gravy and asked his brother, Matthew, to say grace. The letter felt like hot coals against his skin one minute and a snowball the next as he forced food down.

  More than sixty years later, his stomach still knotted up thinking about that time in his life. He didn’t look at Emmy Jo when he talked.

  “That day my mother’s folks were killed, my dad’s grandparents told him that his parents weren’t coming back and he had to live with them forever. He said that his grandma was weeping so hard that his grandpa had to tell him that his father and mother had been killed in a bank robbery that had gone bad. They’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Oh, no! Poor little guy.” Emmy Jo’s big blue eyes misted over.

  “He was so angry that he ran out of the house and down the hill to the dirt road going into town. He said in the letter that the woman in the wagon was singing when he threw a big rock at the horses. He thought that no one should be happy and singing when his parents were dead and he’d never hug them again. Then it all happened so fast and yet it took forever. The horse that he hit in the leg stumbled and the other one went wild. The wagon fell off to one side and the two people went flying out into the air.”

  “Oh. My. God!” Emmy Jo covered her eyes. “Your father caused the deaths as a little boy. What happened to him?”

  “He never told anyone about it, kept it bottled up inside him. He became an unruly child and never finished school. His grandfather died when he was fourteen. His grandmother really lost control of him. She died when he was twenty and he inherited the family farm. He lost it in a poker game one night to Jesse Grady’s daddy and won our house the same night from an old guy that only lived in Hickory a few months.”

  Emmy Jo’s voice was barely a whisper. “He told you all that in the letter?”

  Seth nodded. Nothing was ever the same after that. He knew why his father left and yet he couldn’t tell his mother without coming clean about what Samuel had written about her. And he could not bear the pain in her eyes every time she looked at him if he knew the shame that she’d suffered. And the bad thing was that none of the sequence of events up to that day or the ones to follow were a damn bit her fault.”

  “What did you say to him when you saw him again?” Emmy Jo asked.

  “I never did see my dad after that. He and Lottie McDonald got into her old car and they never came back to Hickory. We didn’t know where he went, but many, many years later, long after Mama was gone, I discovered they’d gone to California and were buried somewhere around Orange Grove.”

  Emmy Jo frowned. “Who was Lottie McDonald?”

  “A barmaid that he’d been having a fling with for several years.”

  “No!” Her voice came out in a screech. “He left your mother to face that kind of embarrassment. Why would he do that?”

  “He said in the letter that he’d always been in love with Lottie and that he’d only married my mother because he was trying to atone for his sins,” Seth answered.

  “How on earth did your mother survive with three kids to take care of and no husband?” Emmy Jo asked.

  “That’s a story for another day. It’s almost lunchtime. Let’s go inside,” he answered. Telling that much had lifted some of the burden from his heart, but he could not answer that question—not today and maybe not ever. Other than his mother’s death, the days that followed his father’s disappearance had been the hardest that he’d ever faced.

  “Does Jesse know about the poker game?”

  “Oh, I’m sure Jesse knows, and if I was to ever see that old bastard again, he’d goad me about it,” he answered.

  “No doubt about that. He’d glory in it,” Emmy Jo said.

  “Oh, yes, he would.” Seth swung his legs out to the side and put a hand on each side of his walker. Getting up after sitting so long was tough, but it was getting easier.

  The story that Seth told played through Emmy Jo’s mind as she helped Oma Lynn bring lunch to the table that day. For dessert, she’d made a chocolate sheet cake that looked exactly like the ones that Tandy stirred up. Looking at it made Emmy Jo so homesick that she had to brush away a tear. She missed her granny, and even if she was cussin’ mad, at least Emmy Jo could hear her voice.

  Oma Lynn brought out three glasses of sweet tea. “I heard that Wyatt and Paula have been offered the church over in Graham.”

  “That didn’t take long. Logan only moved out Monday night.” Emmy Jo dipped into the soup. “Good Lord, Oma Lynn. You should run a restaurant.”

  “No, thank you. I was waitress at one over in Graham for more than twenty years. I like this job much better,” she said.

  “So you think they’ll really move from Hickory?” Seth asked.

  “If they do it’ll be the first time in my lifetime that a Grady hasn’t been a preacher at that church,” Oma Lynn said.

  “So Jesse’s daddy was a preacher?” Emmy Jo’s eyes widened.

  “As well as a farmer. He owned a big spread out west of town,” Seth said. “Got religion about the time that Jesse was born and started preachin’ on the side.”

  Emmy Jo wondered just what sins Jesse was trying to atone for by becoming a preacher.

  Thursday morning found a nervous Emmy Jo waiting in Libby’s Diner for her grandmother to show up. Tandy had been cool on the phone the night before, but she had agreed to meet Emmy Jo for breakfast—if Emmy Jo was paying.

  Emmy Jo heaved a long sigh of relief when she saw Tandy park her old Ford outside the café. But then she held her breath when Tandy just sat there as if she was trying to make up her mind whether to leave or get out of the car. Finally, the door opened and Tandy swung her legs out, then stood up and took another full minute to close the door. Emmy Jo held her hands tightly to keep from clapping when Tandy took two steps toward the café. She ignored Emmy Jo’s wave when she was inside and stopped to talk to Henry, who was having doughnuts and coffee. Until she slid into the seat on the other side of the booth, Emmy Jo still wasn’t sure if she’d actually join her.

  Libby brought two cups of coffee to the table. “So what’s goin’ on in your world besides winning big at bingo?”

  “Not much. I bought a new set of tires for my car and paid the electric bill with the money,” Tandy answered. “I got enough left to play again Friday night. Probably ruinin’ my luck by havin’ breakfast with this renegade.”

  “Or maybe you’re doubling your luck.” Libby laughed. “What can I get you girls this morning?”

  “I’ll have the breakfast special,” Tandy said. “With a short stack of pancakes and fruit on the side.”

  “Same here,” Emmy Jo said.

  Libby smiled. “Be right out. Won’t take long. The morning rush is done over. Any time you want to go back to work, we’d sure hire you, Miz Tandy. We ain’t had a waitress as dependable as you were since you left us.”

  “Thanks, Libby, but these old legs have stood on concrete long enough in their lifetime. I feel lucky I ain’t had to have my knees or hips replaced,” Tandy said.

  “Well, the offer is always there if you want to work a few hours a week,” Libby told her as she headed toward the kitchen.

  Tandy tucked her chin-length gr
ay hair behind her ears and leaned forward. “I heard that Logan moved in with Jack in my trailer court and that Wyatt and Paula are thinking about taking a preachin’ job in Graham. And that Jesse Grady is about to have a fit over it all. Good! That old son of a bitch.”

  “Granny!” Emmy Jo exclaimed and whispered, “What else did you hear?”

  “Well, for the first time in history, instead of being the outcast, I was the queen. Everyone wants to know about that house and Seth, and since you work there . . .” Tandy let the sentence dangle.

  “You want me to gossip?”

  “No, gossip is just facts that might be true. I want the real deal,” Tandy replied.

  “Tell you what: You tell me something about Seth and Jesse when they were in high school and I’ll tell you something about the house. Like I want to know why that rival team only whipped Jesse and not any other members of the Hickory football team. Why didn’t anyone ever identify those guys who did the beating?” she asked.

  “That was a long time ago and I don’t remember the details.” Tandy looked over Emmy Jo’s shoulder, a sign that she was lying. “Now tell me about the house. I don’t give a damn about Seth, but I would like to know what the inside of that big place looks like.”

  “Don’t seem like a fair trade to me. I didn’t get anything, so why should I give anything?” Emmy Jo said.

  “Don’t you take that tone with me. I don’t care if you are grown and about to get married. This is not a trade-off and I’m not talkin’ about things that happened more than sixty years ago,” Tandy said.

  “Then I’m not talkin’ about Seth or his house. And since you are so old that you don’t remember, let’s talk about my wedding,” Emmy Jo said.

  Tandy narrowed her eyes and set her mouth in a firm line. “I have the memory of an elephant but some things is best left alone. And I don’t want to talk about your wedding.”

  “Can I use your mama’s wedding ring as my something old? I still want to wear your pearls. I want to tie the wedding ring into my bouquet or maybe sew it into the hem of my dress. I think it would bring good luck to my marriage.”