The Potluck Club

by Linda Evans Shepherd

  the Potluck Club

  A NOVEL

  Linda Evans Shepherd

  and Eva Marie Everson

  © 2005 by Linda Evans Shepherd and Eva Marie Everson

  Published by Fleming H. Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  Printed in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shepherd, Linda E., 1957–

  The potluck club: a novel / by Linda Evans Shepherd and Eva Marie Everson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8007-5984-2 (pbk.)

  1. Women—Societies and clubs—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Prayer groups—Fiction. 4. Women cooks—Fiction. 5. Colorado—Fiction. 6. Cookery—Fiction. I. Everson, Eva Marie. II. Title.

  PS3619.H456P68 2005

  813′.6—dc22 2005006687

  The lyrics on page 224 are from “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” words by William Walford (1845) and music by William B. Bradbury (1861).

  The lyrics on page 323 are from “This Is My Father’s World,” words by Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1901) and music by Franklin Lawrence Sheppard (1915).

  To the woman I called “Grandmother,” a fine lady who knew her way around a Southern kitchen and who taught me much about loving Jesus. I love and miss you!

  —Eva Marie Everson

  To my wonderful mother, who cooks even better than Lisa Leann Lambert. Also, to the sisterhood of AWSA (Advanced Writers and Speakers Association). I love you, girlfriends. And a special thanks to my dear friend Eva Marie. You and your characters rock!

  —Linda Evans Shepherd

  Contents

  1 Oh, the ladies of the Potluck Club

  2 Evangeline—Simmering the Past

  3 Does she know she’s infamous.

  4 Lisa Leann—On a Roll

  5 Invader, that’s a good word for her

  6 Goldie—Chilling Report

  7 That woman is loyal to a fault

  8 Donna—Steaming the Locals

  9 No one can call her a cream puff

  10 Lisa Leann—Barbecuing the Competition

  11 She’s got some nerve

  12 Lizzie—Mincing Words

  13 Everyone knows she’s rock solid

  14 Goldie—Crushed Hopes

  15 She knows it.

  16 Vonnie—Searing Revelation

  17 That’s her, a mother without children

  18 Evangeline—Dirty Dishes

  19 Her life will never be the same

  20 Lizzie—Savory Family Dinner

  21 The town’s most cautious woman—in a speeding car

  22 Donna—Café Chats

  23 That girl doesn’t embarrass easy

  24 Lizzie—Tea Time

  25 She’s got something on her mind

  26 Vonnie—In a Pickle

  27 Oh, she’s got some stories to tell

  28 Donna—Fresh Discovery

  29 What secrets doesn’t that girl know

  30 Goldie—Marriage on Toast

  31 The woman is gone

  32 Lisa Leann—Heated Showdown

  33 What’s she got going on

  34 Evangeline—Scalding Story

  35 Don’t get on her bad side

  36 Donna—Grilling Vonnie

  37 She’s hiding something

  38 Vonnie—Hot Confessions

  39 Can’t figure her out

  40 Evangeline—Preserved Memories Shared

  41 She’ll set you straight

  42 Goldie—Measured Steps

  43 A working woman after all these years

  44 Donna—Hashing Out the Meeting

  45 She’ll beat you at your own game

  46 Evangeline—Spicy Encounters

  47 That woman is a legendary kisser

  48 Donna—Half-Baked Attempt

  49 That girl is always one step ahead.

  50 Vonnie—Sweet Reunion

  51 She’s a woman of mystery

  52 Lizzie—Trouble Boiling Over

  53 She’s a true friend

  54 Evangeline—Relishing Faith

  The Potluck Club Recipes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Join the Potluck Club

  1

  Oh, the ladies

  of the Potluck Club . . .

  Clay Whitefield sat in his usual spot at the Higher Grounds Café and shook his head as he jotted notes on a clean sheet of his reporter’s notebook. The Potluck Club. This was a group so exclusive, he’d seen country clubs easier to get in to—a group led by a sassy old maid named Evangeline Benson.

  Evangeline Benson, Clay Whitefield thought. Now there’s a piece of work . . .

  2

  Simmering the Past

  Maybe I should begin by telling you what the Potluck Club is, exactly. More than twenty years ago my dearest and oldest friend in the world, Ruth Ann McDonald, and I started praying together on a regular basis. We’d meet once a month at my house. I’d make coffee, and Ruth Ann would make one of her near-famous coffee cakes. While the aroma of good-to-the-last-drop Maxwell House wafted through the kitchen and into my dining room, Ruth Ann and I sat waiting at my grandmother Miller’s old cherry dining room table, our Bibles spread out before us. I’d read a passage or two—perhaps something the Lord had given me since last we met—and then we would share the issues that needed our prayerful attention.

  “I think,” Ruth Ann said at our very first meeting, “that we should begin by praying for Annice Brightman’s daughter, Julie.” She reached for the pad and pen she kept tucked in her Bible’s cover.

  I watched her push her large-frame glasses up the bridge of her petite nose before she jotted “Julie B.” on the pad.

  “Why? What’s going on with Julie?”

  Ruth Ann shook her head sadly, without so much as a “only her hairdresser knows for sure” blond hair moving on her head, then looked back down to the paper and began to retrace the name of the girl who needed our prayer.

  “That boy she’s been dating?” I asked.

  “That boy she’s been dating.”

  This, of course, was the Lord’s confirmation.

  I pressed a hand to the dark brown hair I wore pulled back in a French twist. Ruth Ann said that with my thin frame I looked like Audrey Hepburn when I wore it that way, but the truth is, it was easy, and around Colorado’s high country, women are into “easy.” Today I keep it cut short with just a hint of curl. Now people say I look more like Shirley MacLaine when she played in that movie about being the late president’s wife who got kidnapped. I think that’s supposed to be a compliment, but I could be wrong.

  “How should we pray, then?” I asked Ruth Ann.

  Ruth Ann looked up and raised her brows. “We’ll pray she sees the light.”

  And we did. We prayed just as hard as we knew how, but Julie Brightman and Todd Fairfield ended up getting married anyway, bringing into the world a precious child—if there ever was one—Abby, about six months later. Not that I’m gossiping. I mean, after all, that child is nineteen years old now, going to school at the same university where I received my degree in business education on an academic scholarship. (The child, not me.)

  Months later Ruth Ann declared we should pray for Janet Martin. “Poor thing,” Ruth Ann said. “She’s got cancer.”

  “How do you
know so much, Ruth Ann?” I asked her. “Do you stand with your ear to a glass pressed against the world or something?”

  Ruth Ann sipped at her coffee before replacing the cup in the saucer. “Very funny, Evangeline. But I’m telling you, I heard it from a reliable source. She was seen in a doctor’s office.”

  Well, that much was true. She was seen in a doctor’s office, only it wasn’t because of cancer. It was an extreme case of vanity. In other words, Janet was getting a nose job.

  So that’s how the Potluck Club began: two women, a pot of coffee, some coffee cake, and enough misinformation to bring down a church. And it would have too, had it not been for Yvonne Westbrook, the godliest thing you’d ever meet, and I’m not kidding.

  Yvonne had been a classmate of Ruth Ann’s and mine, but Ruth Ann and I hadn’t been especially close with her growing up. Then Ruth Ann went off to the Great Lakes with her new husband, and Vonnie and I ended up going to the same college and becoming sorority sisters. While I was studying business management, Vonnie worked toward getting her RN. In our senior year, Vonnie decided to go to Berkeley (I can’t imagine why, but she did), but she didn’t stay long. Before I knew it, I heard she’d gone back to Cherry Creek College to finish school.

  After graduation I came back to our sweet little town of Summit View, Colorado (God’s country), and started a home-based tax service, and Vonnie eventually went to work for Doc Billings. Of course, that was before everything around here changed . . . before the “Rushies” moved to town, bringing us out of simple life and into a more modern existence.

  I imagine you’d like to know a little more about Summit View, wouldn’t you? Well, know right up front that if anyone in this town has the authority to inform you, it’s me. After all, my daddy was, at one time, the mayor.

  Summit View, Colorado—population 25,000—is pretty as a picture when it comes to scenic mountain towns. It was established during the Colorado Gold Rush in 1856, about ten years after the California Gold Rush.

  I remember sitting on my grandmother’s front porch, rocking in a rocker, listening to Grandpa telling us the stories he remembered being told himself back when he was a child.

  “Back then,” he said, “we had gold mines, all right, but we had some of the best gambling joints and houses of . . .” and then he’d look at me sideways and say, “ill repute.”

  “Daddy, why on earth do you say things like that?” my mama implored. “Why encourage her natural curiosity?”

  “She’s twelve years old, Minnie. Don’t you think she knows what a house of ill repute is?”

  I nodded. “I know what a house of ill repute is, Mama,” I said, though I had no idea. I had to go ask Ruth Ann, who went to her older brother, who told us, giggling, then called us innocents too. I suppose we were, and I suppose that’s not a bad thing. It’s a shame to know your beloved little town used to harbor things like that.

  But we also have lost gold mines and stage coach robberies. The stories about those have delighted our children. Not a generation has come and gone but what some pack of kids hasn’t wandered around the hills, looking for lost bags of gold or mother lode never found.

  With or without the gold, we have some of the most beautiful mountains, true testaments to the creative hand of God. Summit View is just two hours west of Denver, near Breckenridge. The town sits on Lake Golden, which is actually over an old mining site. And you can see the ski runs in Breckenridge if you stand on a high spot overlooking the lake.

  When I was younger, if you lived in Summit View, you knew everybody and everybody knew you. Of course, that was before the Rushies came to town.

  “We’re calling them Rushies,” I told Vonnie one evening while I stood at the kitchen table folding some laundry that was still warm and soft from a recent fluff-’n-puff in the dryer. “You know, all these new couples moving here from California with all their West Coast ways.”

  Vonnie chuckled in that soft, little girl laugh of hers. “That’s a good name for them, Evie. I understand you have a couple of them moving into the house across the street from you.”

  I gave my best humph.

  “Have you gone over to meet them yet?”

  I grabbed at a towel in the clothes basket atop the kitchen table. “Now, why in the world would I want to do that? I don’t like all this . . . you know, people coming in here. What’s wrong with just settling in Breckenridge or Vail? That’s where most of them work, isn’t it?”

  “What’s wrong with getting to know them, Evie? I lived in California. Remember? And I’m not a bad person.”

  “Maybe you weren’t there long enough to be affected.”

  “And maybe inviting them to church or to one of our suppers on Wednesday night in the social hall might be in order.”

  I laid the folded towel on top of the others at the far end of the table without responding.

  “Do they have children?”

  “How in the world should I know?” I paused. “One.”

  Vonnie giggled again.

  The extended cord of the phone kept bopping me on the elbow, so I grabbed at it and tucked it under my arm. “I saw a baby crib going into the house, okay?”

  Vonnie laughed hard then. “Oh, Evangeline. You are so funny. Now, don’t you think that if they have a baby, they might like to know we have a lovely church right here in town?”

  We do have a lovely church—that much is true—though at one time Grace Church, a charming but small white clapboard structure, was the only church in town. We have a few more now, mainly because of the Rushies coming in and starting up their own fellowships. But none of them have the history of Grace Church. None of them were established by Father Dryer, the famous circuit preacher who visited his churches by cross-country skiing through the mountains. We have the stained glass windows to prove it too. Each one depicts a scene from the skiing preacher’s ministry.

  Okay, so yes, I did invite the neighbors, and they did graciously attend our services for a while, but like I said, that was before so many moved into Summit View and changed everything, including the cost of living.

  We prayed about this during one of our Potluck Club meetings. By this time our twosome had grown to a foursome. After all, Jesus said (and I quote), “Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”

  That’s Matthew 18:19 in King James Version, if you need to mark it, and Ruth Ann and I figured that if our two prayers were reaching the heavenly Father, then surely four would reach him all the faster. So that’s when Vonnie and Lizzie joined us. Like Ruth Ann and Vonnie and me, Lizzie Prattle had grown up here and had attended school with us. She hadn’t been the most popular girl in school, and she wasn’t the smartest or the prettiest, but she always loved the Lord, and that was good enough for us.

  And she makes a wonderful apple pie. Plus, her husband is the president of the local bank and on the finance committee at Grace, so she’s good to have around. Okay, okay. All that, and she’s so often the voice of reason. Like Vonnie.

  Around this time, I was throwing in a dish from one of my mama’s recipes, usually some sort of vegetable, Ruth Ann was bringing some of her nice homemade melt-in-your-mouth buttery biscuits, Vonnie was bringing along Mexican tamales (which she said she learned to cook when she was at Berkeley), and Lizzie was bringing the pie or a cake.

  While we prayed about the increase in taxes, we also prayed for Ruth Ann, who hadn’t been feeling well. We prayed the Lord would give her more energy, and then when she went to the doctor, we prayed that the doctor would find the cause. Then we prayed when he found that she had cancer. They wanted to operate, so we prayed about that, and we prayed while she was in surgery. And then we prayed a few days later as we wept at her funeral in the pews of Grace Church, wondering why God answers some prayers just like we want and doesn’t answer others the right way at all.

  At least not the right way as far as we can see.
But God’s ways are not our ways. No, they are not. And one of these days when Ruth Ann and I are sipping on coffee and nibbling on coffee cake in the Great Beyond, I’m going to understand why my best friend in the whole wide world had to leave me all alone at such an early age.

  By the way, I’m not married and I never have been. Not that I didn’t want to find that special someone. I did—I just never found him.

  “It must be wonderful,” I said to my sister Peggy on the evening before her wedding. “To have found Matthew and to be so in love.”

  Peggy, older by three years, and I were burrowed under the thick comforter on her bed. This would be our last night to sleep in the same bed together as sisters. We had the covers pulled up to our chins, lying face-to-face, whispering in her moonlit bedroom.

  She smiled and sighed deeply. “It is wonderful, Evie. But don’t you worry. You’ll meet Prince Charming soon enough and fall in love and get married just like me.”

  Either Prince Charming never came to Summit View or I was too busy to notice him, but either way, here I am, alone in a rambling old house, Mama and Daddy’s before they were killed in an auto accident. I have good friends, and I’m active socially and civically, and I’m the president of the Potluck Club, which by the way is having its meeting tomorrow.

  Now, about the PLC. Nothing—and I do mean nothing—about the Potluck Club is as it used to be. What began as two and then boomed to four has all but exploded to five.

  Make that six.

  We have another transplant in town—Lisa Leann Lambert, if you can buy that name—and she’s invited herself to the group. How she managed to sidestep her way in is another story. Goodness, even our pastor’s precious wife, Jan Moore (who, like Lisa Leann is also from Texas, but we all love and adore her), can’t get an invitation into our group. I’ve come to the conclusion that Texas women are either “sweet as pie” or “pushy as cowpokes.”

  Donna Vesey is neither. Another of our members, Donna . . . well . . . humph. Deputy Sheriff Donna Vesey, daughter of Sheriff Vernon Vesey, that girl, in a sense, cost me a husband.