The Potluck Club

by Linda Evans Shepherd

  “Hello?” I answered when I’d reached the phone.

  “Hi, Lisa, it’s Vonnie.”

  Ah, Evangeline’s sidekick. She’s one of the polyester gals who shared in those warm cinnamon rolls that Sunday morning in the parking lot. “Lisa, something’s come up. I’m afraid tomorrow’s club meeting is off.”

  “Off? What’s up, Vonnie?”

  “Evie has unexpected company.”

  “Really? Who?

  “I really can’t say.”

  Can’t or won’t? “Thanks for calling; you’re a darlin’.”

  “Bye, now.”

  Unexpected company? I sat down on the pink Victorian. I figured this may work to my advantage. I’d long ago figured out that leaders have to actually serve the group before they could expect to be in charge. And just think, there I sat with my mouth-watering barbecued brisket in hand. Briskets are even better than warm cinnamon rolls in terms of persuasion. This could be my first attempt to win over Evie before taking over the Potluck Club’s presidency. She’d never know what hit her.

  5

  Invader, that’s

  a good word for her . . .

  Clay sat at his scarred desk, pecking away on his laptop.

  From the minute Lisa Leann Lambert invaded the city limits of Summit View . . .

  “Invaded, now there’s a good word,” he said to his two gerbils, Bernstein and Woodward, who dutifully watched their owner from the cage atop the desk. There was sure to be a tug-of-war between Lisa Leann and Evangeline Benson.

  “Evangeline doesn’t take kindly to anyone treading on her beloved Potluck,” he continued the conversation with “the boys,” focusing more on Bernstein than Woodward, who was climbing into the cage’s wheel for his nightly run.

  Bernstein blinked back at him as though interested in the rest of what his owner had to say. “No one has even dared. Even Donna Vesey treads lightly. Between you and me, I wouldn’t have even thought that lady knew how . . . to tread lightly, I mean.” Clay jutted his neck forward. “Why are you looking at me like that?” He reached for a nearby can of cashews, dug into it with his beefy hands, and then dropped a few nuts into his upturned mouth, saving one and slipping it between the wires of the cage. Bernstein took it greedily while Woodward continued his jog.

  Clay—using only his index fingers—continued his typing. Even as the number of the Potluckers has increased, it’s been by invitation only. Women whisper at the diner about it, sure.

  Everybody who is anybody wants to know what really goes on at those meetings. But not one has ever dared invade it.

  Until now.

  6

  Chilling Report

  Life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, Lord.

  Not that I’m questioning your ways. I’m not. I’m just telling you what’s on my mind. In my heart. And what’s on my mind and in my heart is that life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

  I felt a lonely tear slip down my cheek and quickly brushed it away, hoping my husband Jack wouldn’t come into the kitchen so early in the morning and find me sitting at the table, Bible spread out before me, crying. He wasn’t that big on women who cry. He wasn’t all that keen on women who get up early to read the Word of God and pray, either.

  But more than that, he wasn’t too keen on me, I didn’t think.

  Maybe that’s too harsh of a statement. Lord, is that judging a man’s heart? Because I don’t mean to judge his heart, you know. I’m just saying how I feel. And if I can’t talk to you about this, who can I talk to?

  Anyway, I stole a quick glance to the microwave’s digital clock to check the time. It was nearly 6:00 in the morning. Jack would be stirring any minute, shuffling his way into the bathroom, where his usual morning grunts and groans would be emitted. Then, as always, he’d step a little livelier down the hallway and into the living room, where he’d sit with an “ahhhhh,” reach for the remote to turn on Fox and Friends, and then call out, “Goldie, you got breakfast started?”

  Not “Good morning.”

  Not “Well, hello Mary Sunshine.”

  Or even, “Did you sleep well?”

  Just, “Goldie, you got breakfast started?”

  And what would I say? The same thing I say every morning. “Almost done, Jack.”

  I stood from the table, closed the Bible, and walked it over to rest on a nearby countertop next to the recipe book I’d pulled off the shelf the night before. After I got Jack off to work and the house straight, I’d be preparing a dish for the Potluck Club’s luncheon and prayer meeting, so I’d gone ahead and laid out the recipe book and ingredients I’d be needing for sweet corn pudding.

  With a final, Well, I guess I asked for it, Lord. Laci told me Jack Dippel would break my heart one day, and he sure did that, I closed my morning chat with God and got busy in the kitchen.

  People around Summit View don’t think I know the truth about Jack. Either that or they think I know the truth but choose to ignore it. Doesn’t matter how one believes. Either way, I’m pretty pathetic, aren’t I? But just to keep the record straight, yes, I know what a womanizer Jack Dippel is. I’ve known about all the women he’s bedded since probably the first affair he had on me . . . in spite of the fact that I’m sure he considers himself discreet.

  And “Christian.” Why, Jack Dippel wouldn’t miss a Sunday sitting that flat fanny of his in a pew at Grace Church. Looking sharp, I might add. Jack Dippel is nothing if not a fine-looking man. Which is, of course, what attracted me to him in the first place.

  I met Jack during my high school senior trip to Washington, D.C. I grew up in the little town of Alma, Georgia—born in nearby Douglas, Georgia, in 1955, which makes me nearing fifty now. I would have to say I was sheltered most of my life. Daddy and Mama had some farmland and made a pretty good living off it, raising three boys and two girls, me being the oldest of the girls but the third child born. Daddy and Mama were just plain good people back then, and they still are. With the exception of Hoy Jr., we’re all still here and we’re all good Christians.

  Hoy Jr. died in a work-related accident. There was never a finer man than Hoy Jr., except maybe our daddy. Hoy Jr. and Daddy were two peas in a pod.

  Daddy and Mama made sure we were in church every time the doors opened: Sunday school, church on Sunday, prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. When we got old enough, we got to go to Friday night YIF meetings. YIF stands for Youth in Fellowship.

  My best friend back then was Laci Hopper. Laci and I did everything together, and most of it was good. The only thing I can think of right off the top of my head that might have been slightly sinful was the time when we were about eleven years old and decided to try smoking. Laci’s daddy smoked, and she managed to slip two cigarettes from his pack of Winstons while he was taking a shower and her mama was cooking supper. That Friday I spent the night at her house, and as soon as we thought her parents and little brother were asleep, we slipped out her bedroom window and ran across the yard to where her mama’s potting shed was. When we got to the back side of it, we slid down low, lit up, puffed like two magic dragons, and then threw up the rest of the night. We didn’t want Mr. and Mrs. Hopper to know what we’d done, of course, so we had to stay outside in the dark and the cold, retching in a hole Laci dug with her mama’s little potting shovel.

  Cured me of ever wanting to do anything even slightly sinful again.

  Until I met Jack Dippel.

  Laci and I managed to work the entire summer before our senior year at one of the two restaurants in Alma so we’d have enough money for the annual trip to D.C. When the big day finally came, we loaded up on the bus with the other seniors, anxious to see where the “Law of the Land” was made and to tour the great old government buildings. When we arrived at the hotel, our teacher, Mrs. Sanderson, said to go right up to our rooms, take a shower, and get dressed and ready for dinner. We were to meet back in the lobby by 5:00 sharp.

  Laci and I raced upstairs, giggling the whole way. When we got to our room
, we opened our luggage and began pulling our clothes out, hanging up the ones that needed to be hung and putting the rest in the dresser drawers. That’s when I spotted a really cute lavender sleeveless sweater of Laci’s and said to her, “That would go so great with my slacks I’m wearing tonight.”

  “Want to wear it?” she asked, already handing it to me.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said with a toss of her dark hair. “Let’s make a deal right now that we can borrow, okay?”

  I took the sweater in one hand and shook her hand with the other. “Deal.”

  So it was that on that particular evening, when I’d showered and dressed ahead of Laci, that I decided to go ahead and go on down to the lobby to check things out. What happened, though, is that I got checked out instead, which I now suppose is understandable, considering Laci’s sweater was a bit too small for me.

  As it turned out, Jack Dippel was in the same hotel, though he was traveling with some college friends. Unlike me, he was unchaperoned, which I suppose I found somewhat exciting and dangerous.

  After looking around the gift shop and perusing the lobby a bit—and not having seen one single familiar face—I took a seat in the center of the room so I could get a feel for the place. I’d hardly been there two minutes when Jack walked up and sat in the chair next to mine.

  I took notice of him immediately. What red-blooded girl wouldn’t? He wasn’t very tall, but he was muscular in a sort of chiseled kind of way. His hair was silky straight and blond, his eyes were blue, and his skin was tanned. He looked like he’d walked off the pages of a Coppertone ad. When he sat—wearing tight jeans and a pullover shirt—he rested his elbows on his knees, turned his face my way, and said, “You’ve got the prettiest red hair I believe I’ve ever seen.”

  My hair. If there is ever anything in my life that has gotten me noticed, it’s my hair. In fact, my real name is Nancy, but my whole life I’ve been called “Goldie” because my hair is “the color of the setting sun on an autumn afternoon,” as Daddy used to say. Knowing it to be my greatest feature, I had taken good care of it and had let it grow until it reached my waist in soft waves.

  At Jack’s words, I reached behind my neck and pulled the length of it over one shoulder. “Thank you,” I said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My friends call me Goldie.” I pressed my lips together.

  “I can see why.” He smiled then, showing off twin dimples. “Where are you from?”

  “Georgia. What about you?”

  “Colorado. I’m here with a few friends, taking a break before summer semester starts.”

  “You’re in college?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I’m a high school senior. This is our senior trip.” I gave the lobby a sweep with my eyes, wondering if any of my classmates might have wandered down. I knew one thing for certain: I didn’t want Mrs. Sanderson to catch me talking to this guy. She’d call Mama and Daddy before I even had time to blink, and Mama would meet me back home with a belt in her hand. Mama didn’t take to me talking to strangers, especially when they were young men.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t dated yet. I had. But they were all boys from church, and so far I hadn’t been allowed to date by myself. It was always group dates with guys and gals from YIF. Up to that very moment, that had always been fine with me.

  “Well, hello Miss Senior from Georgia,” Jack said, reaching a hand out to shake mine. “I’m Jack Dippel.”

  I took his hand, then released it and brought mine back, immediately catching the scent of English Leather. “Hello, Jack Dippel. I’m Goldie Brook.”

  Jack gave me a sideward smile. “That name deserves to be in a book somewhere. Or on a movie screen. Goldie Brook.”

  I giggled. “Well, I doubt it.”

  “So what are you doing tonight?” he asked. “Out to dinner with the class?”

  I nodded.

  He leaned closer, like he wanted to whisper something to me, so I leaned nearer to him. “What are you doing after that?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess we’re coming back here and going to bed.”

  He held my green eyes captive with his blue ones. “I’d really like to get to know you better, but I’m going out for dinner too.” He moistened his lips with his tongue. “Tell you what. Meet me back down at the pool at 11:00.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I smiled at him. “What if we got caught?”

  “Got caught? Got caught doing what? We’re just going to sit at the pool and talk.” He held up his hand as though he were taking an oath. “I swear.”

  I bit my bottom lip and looked up just in time to see several of my classmates stepping out of the elevator. “I gotta go,” I said, standing.

  Jack stood too, taking my hand in his as though we were spies passing notes. “Meet me,” he whispered. “Come on.”

  I gave him a coy look from the corner of my eye. “Maybe,” I said with a smile, knowing I would indeed somehow, some way, manage to be at the pool at 11:00 that night.

  Jack was right. All we did that night was talk. And the next night, and the night after that. By the fourth night, though, we were all over each other. Not in a bad way. We just started kissing, and we kissed all night long . . . or at least until about 1:00 when I went back to the room, where Laci waited for the nightly report.

  When we left D.C., I cried. Jack and I exchanged addresses and phone numbers and promised to stay in touch, but I felt like my insides were coming out and that I might as well go home and die. No boy from Alma, Georgia, would ever compare to Jack Dippel. As soon as we got on the bus, Laci handed me a little gift: stationery she’d stolen from the desk in our hotel room and a pen. “Go ahead,” she said. “Start writing him. You know you want to.”

  I couldn’t mail letters to Jack from the house, so every day when I went into town for my shift at the restaurant, I’d drop a sealed-with-a-kiss envelope in the mailbox outside the post office. I told him he’d better not send letters to my house but instead send the letters to Laci’s with no return address, which is what he did. He’d also call me every Friday when I spent the night at her house, and we’d talk, me stretched out on Laci’s satiny bedspread with tiny goose bumps up and down my body. Jack Dippel had a way of doing that to me.

  I should have known a relationship started on secret meetings and deception would lead to disaster, but I was young and foolish and so in love I couldn’t see straight. That included when fall came and I took a clerical job with Dr. Thomason. I told Jack I wasn’t planning to go to college right away because I was unsure what I wanted to do, but the truth was my parents couldn’t afford to send me and my grades weren’t good enough to get me a scholarship. Truth be completely told, what I wanted more than anything was for Jack to somehow arrive in Alma and take me away.

  Laci and I talked about it all the time . . . what it would be like to be Mrs. Jack Dippel. We continued to hold on to that dream even when Jack told me he was dating a girl in college but still had feelings for me.

  “I just want to be honest with you, baby,” he said during one of our Friday night long-distance marathons. “It’s not that I don’t love you, because I do. You know I do.”

  Tears welled up inside me. “I know you do,” I whispered.

  “Are you crying? Oh, man. Don’t cry. Baby, please don’t cry. I can’t stand it when a girl cries.”

  “I won’t,” I said, crying all the more. Laci was in the room. Her brow was furrowed as she brought me a box of tissues from her dresser.

  “I swear to you, it’s just to have someone for parties and things like that. She’s not you, Goldie.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s not even pretty.”

  I coughed out a sarcastic laugh. “I have trouble believing that.”

  He paused then, quiet so long I thought he’d hung up on me. “Tell you what. What if I come to Alma next month for Chri
stmas?”

  My heart literally stopped beating. “What?”

  “Seriously. I want to meet your family anyway, and it’ll give us a chance to be together again. I’ll come the week before so I don’t mess with my mother’s plans for the holidays.”

  By this time I’d sat straight up on the bed. “What?” I asked again. “Jack, don’t you know my parents don’t know about you? Haven’t you figured that out?”

  “Don’t you think it’s time they did? I mean, after all—”

  “After all what?”

  He paused again. “Look, baby. We’ll talk about that later.”

  “We’ll talk about what later?”

  He laughed then, the soft, adorable little laugh I’d come to love so much. “Who loves you?”

  “You do,” I said so softly I’m surprised he could even hear me. “That’s my girl.”

  Jack came at Christmas that year and met my family—a tenser Christmas there has never been since the birth of Jesus. Hoy Jr. was living back then and in his own place with his wife and their baby, so I talked him into letting Jack stay with them. By the end of the second day, Jack had sweet-talked Mama into loving him and had nearly won over Daddy too. By the time he went home—me crying like a lovesick fool—he’d won over the entire family, our pastor, and half of Alma.

  Jack Dippel is just plain good at winning people over. The only person by this time who didn’t love Jack was Laci, and I guess with her knowing everything, she saw right through him. Sometimes I wish I had.

  Two years, five “other girlfriends,” and a college degree later, Jack and I got married. We honeymooned in D.C. for the sake of sentiment, stayed in the same hotel, and, at Jack’s insistence, “met” by the pool at 11:00.

  “We’ll make out a while then go upstairs,” he said, nibbling on my neck as we rode the elevator to the seventh floor.

  We stayed in room 714. I’ll remember that number till the day I die, I think.

  “Where you will really become Mrs. Jack Dippel,” he concluded, his eyes all twinkly. My goodness, how that boy could sweet-talk.