Deep Dixie

by Annie Jones

  Deep Dixie

  By, Annie Jones

  Copyright 2012 by Luanne Jones

  Published by PoutyGirl Productions

  Cover by PoutyGirl Productions

  Interior layout: http://www.formatting4U.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at AnnieLuanneJones@yahoo.com. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For more information on the author and her works, please see www.facebook.com/anniejones.author

  Updated and re-edited from the original published in 1999

  reprinted 2006 by Multnomah Books

  Chapter One

  The first time he laid eyes on her, Riley Walker should have known he was in over his head.

  He’d been taking a sort of self-guided inspection tour of the town of Fulton’s Dominion, Mississippi, in the company pickup, a fifteen-year-old faded blue junker with white lettering on the door: Walker and Son Sawmill. He had opened his collar and rubbed his neck where the unaccustomed tie had half-strangled him all morning. Riley hated all things constricting, which was probably why he’d never married and always busted his backside to stay in business by himself. Until now.

  He still wanted to look over the records and reports but he had little doubt that he’d sign the papers to make him a partner in the town’s main source of income and employment. That he would become the town’s newest citizen.

  So when the old truck had shuddered, but the engine growled in readiness to surge forward, it was Riley who hesitated as he rolled to a stop on the corner of the nearly deserted downtown street. Two empty parking spots in front of the doctor’s office had caught his eye. Just that quick, he had made up his mind to stop and get feel for the place. He flicked on his blinker, turned the wheel in a hard right, and gunned the motor.

  The angry blare of a car horn tore through the stillness of the almost idyllic small-town scene.

  Riley rammed his foot down on the pedal. His truck’s brakes squealed. His entire body tensed. The truck skidded to a halt, its back end fishtailing just enough to one side to have taken the door off another car had one been in the next lane.

  The honking culprit—a sleek, red luxury car—went gliding through the intersection, pretty as you please. Had she even paused for the stop sign? He was sure she hadn’t. As for the dark-haired beauty in the driver’s seat, she never so much as turned her head to see what kind of havoc her recklessness had caused.

  Riley leaned out the window. “Hey! There are other people using these streets lady!”

  As zingers went, it stunk. Had absolutely no effect, either.

  Didn’t make the woman stop and realize the kind of problem her thoughtless, selfish actions might have caused. Nor did it make Riley feel any better about almost having crashed his truck or about having, for all intents and purposes, wrecked his positive impression of the town he needed to think so highly of.

  He gritted his teeth. When he became a part of this community that lady had better look out. He was not going to put up with that kind of behavior in a town where he was raising his little girl. No way. No how.

  In general, Riley made it a point to act on his beliefs and right now he believed someone ought to teach the careless woman a lesson.

  Her brake lights flared.

  Well, maybe that someone could be him.

  The red car came to a halt, right there in the middle of the street. It just sat there for a full minute, not moving. In contrast, the three or four people inside the car had erupted in a commotion of hands waving, fingers pointing, and arms flailing. Riley even thought he heard a yappy little dog barking. The red car lunged forward, stopped again, then lurched into one of the empty parking spots in front of a building with a brass sign listing the names of two doctors and a physician’s assistant.

  “Perfect.” Riley had her now.

  With the flawless timing of a two-man saw operation—an exacting dance of give and take—the driver’s door flung open just as Riley made the turn into the spot. The driver leapt out, tossed her long, black hair back and used one hand to hold her skirt down. She never so much as wobbled on her high heels as she stepped, dead on, into his truck’s path.

  Her eyes, the set of her chin, the very way she carried herself spoke a mix of fire and fine breeding that set off warning sirens in Riley’s head.

  And yet there remained a vulnerability about her that made him lean forward to study her a moment. Maybe it was because her reaction seemed almost like a mother bear protecting a cub. Or because beneath the polish of the clothes, the look and the bravado, she had the face of an angel and the kind of figure that never showed up in women’s magazines unless it was as a “before” picture. She wasn’t fat, far from it, she looked healthy and strong. She was—

  “Oh, no you don’t!” She planted her feet firm and threw up her hands in a move he suspected she’d perfected as a kid, lip- synching to the song “Stop in the Name of Love.”

  She was amazing. Riley couldn’t hold in his grin. His anger now reduced to a mishmash of feelings that took on the chiseled clarity of a glob of cold grits.

  “Hold it right there, Bubba!” She had an accent rich as Mississippi top soil, with a full, cultivated quality that told anybody listening this lady was not somebody to be fooled with.

  His grin broadened. He leaned out the truck window. “Name isn’t Bubba, ma’am, it’s—”

  “Forgive my manners, but I don’t have time for introductions. Suffice it to say, sir, that unless your name is painted on this place along with a big ol’ ‘Reserved for’ sign, it doesn’t really matter who you are. You can’t park here.” She stabbed her finger downward with a defiant flair worthy of one of her fore-mother’s protecting the homeland from marauding Yankees.

  “So just back up the Bubba-mobile and find another spot.”

  “Bubba-mobile?” Suddenly she didn’t seem quite so charming.

  A white-haired man in a rumpled business suit popped out of the front seat on the passenger side. He raised his hand in the air, one finger pointing heavenward like an old-time politician making a campaign promise, and announced, “I’ve got to get that wheelchair. Don’t nobody go nowhere ‘til I’m back.”

  “Wheelchair?” Riley watched the poor old fellow toddle off and disappear into the doctor’s office. What kind of unthinking imbecile careens through town and runs a stop sign with an elderly gentleman in need of a wheelchair in tow?

  Riley turned his attention back to the woman who had almost collided with his truck, his mind clear once again. “Listen, lady—”

  “I thought I made it clear to you. I do not have time to listen. I apologize profusely for this little inconvenience, but I do think it’s the least you can do for me, considering you almost came hurtling through a stop sign back there and could have done who knows what kind of damage to me and my passengers.”

  “I almost—? Hurtling? Me? Ran a stop sign?”

  “No need for a confession of guilt, sir. I won’t take down your license plate and turn you in.” She’d been fiddling with her pocketbook and all of a sudden she whipped out a shiny black pen with gold fittings. She pulled off the cap to reveal the gold nib that looked more like a piece of art than a writing tool. She brandished the elegant thing with a flourish. “That is, I won’t take down your license unless it becomes absolutely necessary.”

/>   “If anyone here needs to be taking names and kicking up a fuss with the law, it’s me.” He held his hand toward her. “In fact, if you’d loan me your pen a moment, I think I might do just that.”

  She looked at his hand as though he’d stuck out a three- day-old dead fish.

  Though he had cleaned up for his business meeting, there was no hiding the calluses and scars on his working man’s hands.

  She recapped the pen with a sharp click and gripped it in her fist. “I’d rather not.”

  He curled his fingers into a loose fist himself. “Yeah, well, maybe I shouldn’t have—”

  “Apology accepted.” She dipped her head in a most gracious bow but kept her eyes riveted on him in an unmistakable warning not to confuse gentility with weakness.

  Having been raised by a woman who could host luncheon’s for Ladies Bible Aid Society, complete with fingerbowls and fresh flowers, excuse herself to take him to the woodshed and tan his hide for acting up, then return in time to pour the tea, Riley was not likely to make that miscalculation. He clenched his teeth. He would never direct pure, unvarnished anger toward a woman unless she threatened the things he held most dear, but frustration? That he had no problem showing. “I wasn’t apologizing. I was—”

  “Just leaving?”

  Frustration? He had the feeling this little gal handed it out by the bucketful. “Is this how you treat people in your town, lady? Almost run them down, pretend the near-death experience was their own doing then deny them access to public property on a high-handed whim?”

  “High-handed? I have never been called high-handed in my life!” She apparently had no reservations about showing anger when she felt justified. “I will have you know that I was raised

  on the principles of fairness and kindness in a family that values things like honor and morality. High-handedness is not the kind of thing we aspire to. I assure you, I strive to respect all God’s creatures.”

  Had she just likened him to a creature? He did his best not to smile too much over how much he was genuinely enjoying her huffy display. “That’s mighty decent of you, Princess Prissypants. Yes, indeed, that you would strive so to respect the likes of even me. Shame you don’t have the same respect for the laws of the road and the rights of others using them.”

  “What did you call me?” Her cheeks went red. Her eyes grew wide.

  On her, it looked good, but it didn’t change Riley’s mind. And though he couldn’t believe he’d used the phrase that proved he had to find a way to communicate that neither included lumbermill swearing nor six-year-old teasing, he felt compelled to say it again. “Princess Prissypants.”

  “How dare you!” If she’d been closer, Riley had no doubt he’d have felt the sting of an old-fashioned Southern belle slap in the face. “How dare you almost plow into my car, then try to blame me, then without so much as knowing who I am or anything about me, start calling me names than imply I’m some kind of...of...spoiled brat.”

  He let his expression tell her he called them as he saw them.

  “Ohhh.” She wrung the single syllable out between her teeth.

  If she was going to say more, he didn’t know because just then that red car of hers jiggled a bit.

  Riley narrowed his eyes, trying to assess what was happening. But the back side of the car had one of those detachable, tinted plastic window shades” pulled down, which blocked his view into the backseat.

  From the far side, the back passenger door opened. A puff of hair that looked like orange-tinted cotton candy stuck out first, getting a good two or three seconds lead on the head that sported it. The woman, dressed in varying shades of clashing pink from head to toe, didn’t say a thing. She seemed oblivious to Riley’s huge truck or the driver’s flamboyant act of putting her body in its path.

  The woman just turned, stuck her head back in the car, and began making cooing sounds...as though she were coaxing someone else to get out.

  That figured. This lady’s car was probably like one of those cars at the circus where clown after clown after clown climbs out, and just when you think there can’t possibly be any more...

  The woman pulled out the smallest, surliest looking bundle of fur—dressed, no less, in one of those froufrou doggie sweaters with big red hearts on it—that Riley had ever seen.

  Making kissing sounds that only seemed to egg on the tiny poodle’s hostilities, Cotton Candy Hair shut the car door with her hip. Hurrying off down the sidewalk, she called out, “Don’t you tell your grandfather I’ve gone to the drugstore, you hear me? You know he’s only allowed in there for lunches anymore, straight to the counter, straight out again. I won’t have that ornery old sticky-fingered nincompoop wandering in there and getting us both ejected before I can pick out all the magazines I want this week.”

  Riley tilted his head and raised his eyebrow a bit. “Raised in a family that values honor and morality, huh?”

  “So, my grandfather has a...” She shut her eyes. Something that was neither a twitch nor a wince passed over her features, she waved her hand, and just that quickly the expression disappeared. She stuck her pen out and looked him straight in the eye. “My grandfather has a problem, but at least he understands the concept of there being some places he must not go. And he heeds those boundaries like the gentleman that he is.”

  “And that I am not? Is that what you’re saying, Princess?”

  She did not reply. But then a true lady wouldn’t have, would she? Riley snorted to show his opinion of her superior attitude and her imaginary “boundaries.” He flexed his hands against the steering wheel. For one utterly decadent moment, he imagined gunning the engine—with the brake on, of course. One good rev that would make the old truck shake and sputter, maybe even backfire, combined with the no-nonsense look he usually saved for rowdy mill workers might just put her in her place.

  Or at least move her out of his.

  She glared at him, as though she knew what he was thinking and daring him to try it.

  “Why am I even bothering with this?” He shook his head and forced himself to let go of the notion of parking his truck, of making his point, and most of all of reaching this woman’s conscience and showing her how destructive her actions might have been. “Women like you never learn anyway. You don’t take responsibility for your actions or care how your selfishness affects others. It’s all about you and demanding that the world revolve around your wants and desires.”

  Her lips parted. The flush on her cheeks went pale.

  He almost felt sorry for her, almost questioned his snap judgment. But he, of all people, understood the level of manipulation and personal denial this type of woman used. He knew firsthand the kind of devastation a woman like this, intent on having her own way, could leave in her wake. Nothing he could say or do would make one bit of difference.

  He sighed. “Keep the parking space lady.”

  She tipped her chin up. If it was in triumph, it seemed a sad one. She mouthed a thank you.

  Riley gave her a nod, his lips pressed shut. He backed the truck up just as the white-haired gentleman appeared at the door of the doctor’s office pushing a wheelchair.

  She stuck her pen in her jacket pocket then rushed to her grandfather. She took control of the chair but did not allow the old gent to climb on board. Instead, she took off with the thing at such a clipped pace the man did not even try to keep up.

  Riley drove by slowly, wanting to make sure she knew that somebody saw her for what she really was.

  She never so much as looked up at him. She just hurried to the car with the chair, set its brake then opened the back door on the driver’s side.

  Figures. She wanted the spot so she could more easily load the chair she wouldn’t even let her grandfather use. Of course, that was a shortsighted jump to an uncertain conclusion, but Riley did not feel particularly generous right now. He turned his attention to the road, took a moment to size up how best to get out of town and head home, then took off.

  Despite his
ill feelings, something in him would not let him go without one backward glance. What he saw made him feel like a world-class heel and called into question every ugly thing he’d imagined about the woman he’d just decided was beyond redemption.

  At the next stop sign, he twisted his head to get a better view over his shoulder, to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.

  There, making use of the extra space provided by the vacant spot, the woman who seemed all flash and self-importance, helped the littlest sprite of an old, black woman out of the backseat of the big red car and into the wheelchair. With a tenderness and patience reserved by most for their greatest treasures on earth, the younger woman settled the gnarled figure into the seat.

  His nemesis fussed here and there to get things situated, stood back then stepped forward to go at it again. This time she fixed her charge’s dress, making sure it covered the stick-thin legs, then set the woman’s sparkling white tennis shoes on the footrests with the most delicate of care.

  One trembling, bony hand touched the younger woman’s arm then reached up to tug at her jacket. The woman who had refused to let Riley use her luxurious pen, slipped it out of her pocket, handed it to the old woman, then whispered something that made her companion grin like a jack-o-lantern, missing teeth and all.

  Riley exhaled slowly. He should have asked why she wanted that space, not just assumed the woman’s motivation was selfish. She might not have told him, of course. Even today in Mississippi, there were some whites who would not give up even a parking spot for the sake of a woman of color, no matter how frail or old she might be. That this fiery woman of gentle breeding stood up to some stranger in a beat-up truck—a man that she, right or wrong, thought had almost run her down—on behalf of this small, dark-skinned woman said more about her than all the assumptions Riley could concoct in a month of Sundays.

  The young woman smoothed her hand over her charge’s thin matte of gray and silver hair, gentle as a mother caressing a child’s downy head, then leaned down and placed the sweetest of kisses on that gaunt, dark cheek. She moved around to take hold of the wheelchair and, with one flip of her hair and shake of her shoulders wheeled her charge forward, like a lady-in-waiting bearing the queen of the land.