The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush Read online

  But she must have sounded pretty terrible, because Mr. Moseley became so concerned that she found herself telling him the real reason she wasn’t coming to work—and taking a perverse pleasure in the unkind things he said about Grady.

  Then, when she realized how she was feeling, she said, “Oh, please, stop! Please, Mr. Moseley. It wasn’t Grady’s fault. He—”

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault?” Mr. Moseley demanded gruffly. “He could have— He shouldn’t have—Oh, hell, you know what I mean, Liz. Of course it’s his fault! It’s always the man’s fault.”

  Was it? Lizzy wondered. Always the man’s fault? But that wasn’t what she had meant, anyway. She had meant that sometimes things just happened, and nobody was to blame.

  Mr. Moseley’s voice softened. “You take as much time as you need, Liz. I don’t want you to come back to work until you’re feeling better.”

  “Thank you,” she said gratefully. “I’m sure I’ll be feeling better tomorrow. I can catch up then.”

  “Don’t worry about catching up,” Mr. Moseley said. “Just concentrate on . . . well, feeling better.”

  Lizzy hung up, thinking how lucky she was to have such a wonderful employer. She would take the whole day to get used to the idea that Grady was now permanently a part of her past. Tomorrow, she would face her future. But first—

  But first, she should go across the street and tell her mother that Grady was getting married, before her mother found it out from someone else. She shivered when she thought about it. This wasn’t going to be easy. Her mother had her heart set on Grady’s becoming her son-in-law.

  As it turned out, though, her mother already knew. Ouida Bennett, who lived across the alley and two doors down, had hurried over right after breakfast with the news. Mrs. Bennett was Twyla Sue Mann’s second cousin, and had heard about the wedding the night before.

  Sally-Lou met her at the kitchen door, wearing her usual gray uniform dress, nicely pressed, and a white apron. “She took it real hard,” Sally-Lou said in a half whisper. “She’s in her bedroom, layin’ down with a wet washrag on her head. She done tol’ Mr. Dunlap she ain’t comin’ in to work at the Five an’ Dime today. You can go in, if’n you want, Miz Lizzy, but it ain’t gonna be good. She’s gonna give you a right big piece o’ her mind.”

  Lizzy had been a toddler when Mrs. Lacy hired Sally-Lou as a live-in maid and baby-minder. The girl was only fourteen, gangly and black as night, but she was already a good cook and housekeeper. She had raised two brothers and knew how to make even a stubborn little girl mind when she was told to do something. Still, Sally-Lou was young enough to play games and sing songs with her young charge and Lizzy had grown up thinking of her as a friend. And when her mother got angry about something or other (she seemed to do that a lot, as Lizzy got older), Sally-Lou was not only a friend but an ally and a staunch defender. If you didn’t know her, she might seem so meek and mild that a good hard breeze would pick her up and carry her off. Looks were deceiving, though. When need be, she was as strong as a stick of stove wood and as feisty as a young rooster.

  But Sally-Lou no longer lived in. Mrs. Lacy, through her own bad management and several foolish ventures, had lost all her money in the stock market. She would have lost her house, too, if Lizzy hadn’t stepped in and bought it from the bank so that her mother would have a place to live. (This was not an unselfish act. Lizzy couldn’t bear the thought of having her mother move in with her.) To make ends meet, Mrs. Lacy, who had always enjoyed being creative with bits of lace and beads and feathers, had begun working in Fannie Champaign’s hat shop.

  But when Fannie closed the shop and went to stay with her cousin in Atlanta, Mrs. Lacy swallowed her last vestige of pride and went to work for Mr. Dunlap at the Five and Dime—hard work, because she had to stand on her feet all day behind the counter. She didn’t really make enough money to keep Sally-Lou, but she couldn’t lose face with her friends by letting her maid go completely.

  So she cut corners elsewhere and paid Sally to come in one morning a week. Now, Sally-Lou was living with her cousin Danzie over in Maysville and working on Tuesday mornings for Mrs. Lacy and the rest of the week for Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson—although Lizzy wondered what was happening now that Mrs. Johnson had left town.

  When Lizzy went into her mother’s bedroom, she saw that the curtains were drawn across the bedroom windows, darkening the room. Mrs. Lacy, a woman of substantial shape and size, was lying flat on her back with a cloth over her forehead. She pushed herself up on her elbows when Lizzy came in.

  “Why did you let him do it, Elizabeth?” she cried petulantly. “Why, oh why oh why?”

  “I could hardly have stopped him, now could I, Mama?” Lizzy asked, lightening the question with a chuckle. But it was the wrong thing to say.

  “Stopped him? You drove him to it!” Mrs. Lacy cried, balling her hands into fists. “I know you did, you wicked, wicked girl! He would have married you at the drop of a hat, if you’d only had the sense to say yes. But you didn’t, and now that girl is pregnant and—”

  With a loud, lamenting groan, she fell back on the pillow and flung an arm over her eyes. “You didn’t even have the grace to tell me about it. I had to hear it from Ouida Bennett, that old busybody. She positively gloated over it when she told me.”

  “I didn’t feel like coming over last night, after Grady told me,” Lizzy said, trying to keep her voice steady. “And I’m sorry Mrs. Bennett gloated. But there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s happened, and Grady’s getting married, and we have to be nice.”

  “Be nice?” her mother cried angrily. “Be nice? Elizabeth Lacy, you stupid girl, how can you say that word! That evil, evil man has dragged your name in the dirt, besmirched your reputation—not to mention mine! And you want us to be nice to him?”

  “You and I aren’t having a baby, Mama,” Lizzy said patiently but firmly. “None of this has anything to do with me or you. And Grady didn’t mean to do what he did. It was an accident, like the time you hit and killed Mr. Perkins’ cow and he threatened to sue.” That was a low blow and Lizzy knew it, but she was getting angry, too. “People make mistakes and get themselves in trouble and have to pay a price. But it doesn’t mean that they’re bad or evil or—”

  “You always were a silly, sentimental fool,” Mrs. Lacy said bitterly. “Just like your father.” She turned over to face the wall. “You’ll have to see them every day, you know. They’ll be neighbors. See how kindly you feel about it then.”

  Lizzy frowned. “See them every day? What are you talking about?”

  Her mother flopped over to look at Lizzy. “Ouida Bennett says Grady is buying the old Harrison house, just a block away from here. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Elizabeth.” She turned back over to face the wall.

  The Harrison house? Lizzy swallowed. For some reason, she hadn’t thought beyond the wedding. It hurt to picture Grady buying a house and living in it with his wife—his wife!—and their new baby. She should probably take a different route to work.

  “If that’s all, Mama,” she said dispiritedly, “I’ll go back home and let you rest.”

  But her mother wasn’t through. “You’ve lost your only chance at getting married,” she said in a muffled voice. “I told you to take it when it was offered. And now you’ve been jilted, for a teenaged Mann!”

  A teenaged Mann? Those two words struck Lizzy as funny and she giggled.

  “Laugh!” Mrs. Lacy snapped. “You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth when you’re old and wrinkled and fat and nobody wants you.” With a storm of weeping, she pulled the pillow over her head.

  Lizzy stood for a moment, trying to think of something to say that might comfort her mother. But it was obvious that she didn’t want to be comforted. She preferred to be miserable and to make her daughter miserable, too. Lizzy quietly left the room, shutting the door behind her. />
  Back in the kitchen, Sally-Lou had brewed a pot of tea and put slices of fresh-baked pecan-and-sour-cream coffee cake—a longtime favorite of Lizzy’s—on two plates. “I’s sorry to hear ’bout Mr. Grady,” she said softly, pouring the tea. “Do beat all, what folks’ll get up to when they think nobody’s lookin’.” She patted Lizzy’s hand. “But you’ll come out all right in the end, Miz Lizzy-luv. I knows it. I knows it.”

  Touched by Sally-Lou’s use of her childhood nickname, Lizzy covered one of the dark hands with her own. “I know it, too, Sally-Lou. It’s hard now, and I’m hurting, but it’ll get better. For Mama, too.”

  “For your mama?” Sally-Lou chuckled as she sat down on the other side of the table. “I don’ think so. I think she’ll go on bein’ all sour inside for as long as she can. And ever’ time she sees Mr. Grady’s mama, she’ll cross over on the other side of the street and lift up her nose and pretend she don’ see her.”

  Lizzy had to smile at that. Sally-Lou was an astute observer of human nature. She spooned sugar into her tea and stirred, then changed the subject, thinking there’d been enough talk about Grady this morning. “You’re working at the Johnsons now, aren’t you? I heard that Mrs. Johnson is out of town.”

  “Gone to her sister’s up in Montgom’ry,” Sally-Lou replied. “She asked me to stay nights at the house and get Mr. Johnson’s breakfast and do for him while she’s gone, ’cept the mornin’ I comes here.” She looked troubled. “I’s worried for him, Miz Lizzy. Some men come by last night after dark. They bang on the door and yell ’bout him closin’ the bank. Say they gonna get him for cheatin’ them outta they money. Night before, somebody throw’d a rock through the front window. Had a note tied to it.”

  “Oh, dear. What did the note say?”

  “Dunno. But it wa’n’t good, the way Mr. Johnson looked when he read it.”

  Lizzy remembered the conversation she had overheard on the street, the farmer saying that somebody ought to take Mr. Johnson out behind the woodshed and teach him a thing or two. She forked a bite of coffee cake, as delicious as always. “I’m sure he hasn’t deliberately cheated anybody. It’s just that people don’t understand what’s going on. Did he call Sheriff Burns when the men came?”

  Sally-Lou shook her head. “They went off right quick, so he didn’t.” She sounded worried. “He did call Mr. Moseley and talked to him some ’bout it. But you know folks, Miz Lizzy. Wouldn’t surprise me none if they be back one of these nights.”

  Until recently, Mr. Johnson had enjoyed an excellent reputation in Darling, for he was a town booster and had been generous in the making of loans—too generous, Mr. Moseley had said regretfully. Some of those loans didn’t stand a chance of being paid back, which is what got the bank into trouble. Nevertheless, people found it easy to see him as the villain behind the closing, and now he was probably the most unpopular man in town. He looked like a villain, too, for he was thin and gaunt, with slick black hair parted precisely down the middle of his scalp and a dark, pencil-thin mustache over colorless lips.

  But Lizzy had a different view of the man. She had dealt with him about the threatened foreclosure of her mother’s house—the very house in which she was sitting right now—and had found him to be unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding. Since then, in her role as president of the Darling Dahlias, she’d met with him several times to discuss the money the club had on deposit in the bank and he had helped her iron out a few wrinkles in the Dahlias’ ownership of the clubhouse they had inherited from their founder, Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone. She felt indebted to him for his help, and every time they got together, she’d liked him more. She was sorry that people were reacting the way they were to the trouble at the bank. Now, she wondered what would happen to Mr. Johnson if the bank somehow failed to reopen.

  “I wish Mr. Johnson had somebody—a friend—who could come and stay with him while this is going on,” Lizzy said, finishing the last of her coffee cake. “Somebody he can trust.”

  “He got his gun,” Sally-Lou said with a dark chuckle. “Although I have my doubts ’bout him usin’ it. He took it out back the other day and tried shootin’ tin cans. Missed ever’ durn one of ’em.”

  Lizzy shivered. The idea of Mr. Johnson with a gun was not exactly heartening. And she didn’t much like the idea of Sally-Lou being in the Johnson house at night, with potential trouble on the other side of the front door. “If you need any help,” she said, “you let me know. You can always call, no matter how late it is.”

  Sally-Lou smiled. “Remember the time me an’ Auntie DessaRae banged on them pots and pans and Miss Hamer gave the rebel yell and chased off that ole gangster who come down from Chicago to cause trouble for them two nice ladies livin’ with Miss Hamer?”

  Lizzy laughed. “How could I forget?” She finished her tea and stood up. “And I certainly owe you one, for helping Verna and Bessie and me that night. So if I can help, all you have to do is call me.”

  Sally-Lou stood, too. “I heard what yo’ mama say to you, Miz Lizzy, but she’s wrong. What Mr. Grady did had nothin’ to do with you. I wants you to know that, down in the very bottom of your heart.”

  “I do,” Lizzy said. “It’s going to take a little getting used to, that’s all.” She felt the tears start and tried to gulp them back. “But I have to do it. I will do it.”

  Sally-Lou put her arms around her and held her for a moment, the way she had held her when Lizzy was a little girl and needed consoling. “That’s right, honey,” she said. “But in the meantime, you be good to yo’se’f, real good. Don’t grieve no more than you can help. You hear?”

  “I hear,” Lizzy said. For a long moment, she let herself take refuge in those comforting arms. Over the years, Sally-Lou had been more of a mother to her than her own mother. Somehow, that made her feel both sad and grateful, at the same time.

  Sally-Lou let her go. “I’ll get you some of that coffee cake to take home with you,” she said. “A piece of that and a cup of coffee and you’re bound to feel like the prettiest spring day they ever was.”

  “Thank you,” Lizzy said. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  Lizzy tried to follow Sally-Lou’s good advice about not grieving, but that turned out to be more difficult than she might have thought. It was true that she hadn’t wanted to get married, at least not right away. But somewhere deep inside, she must have harbored the secret expectation that someday, she and Grady would get married and have a family. She must have loved him more than she thought. Now that expectation—that love—was gone, gone utterly.

  But even worse than her own disappointment was the knowledge that Grady had sentenced himself to a marriage he hadn’t chosen, and that understanding left a heavy burden on her heart. This would be even harder for him than it was for her, she thought. She spent the afternoon boxing up the many little gifts he had given her and the photos of the two of them together—and crying, not so much for herself, but for him.

  So when the doorbell gave an impatient peal late that afternoon, Lizzy was not at all prepared for company. She was wearing an old yellow print housedress and comfortable slippers, her hair was tied up in a blue bandana, and she looked a wreck. When she saw Verna and Myra May standing on the porch, she started to tell them that she’d rather they’d come back later.

  But Myra May, carrying a large basket in each hand, paid no attention. She pushed past Lizzy and into the house, heading for the kitchen.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Lizzy protested. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t feel like—”

  “We know,” Verna said. “But we thought you might not want to cook tonight, so we brought you a little something to eat.”

  Myra May turned at the kitchen door. “We know you don’t want to see us, either, so feel free to cuss us out. But we warn you, it won’t do a smidgeon of good. You’re not going to get rid of us.”

  “You two!” Lizzy rolled her e
yes.

  Verna put her hand on Liz’s arm. “Sorry, kid,” she said softly. “I know you’re hurting. But you’ll feel better if you play along. You know how pushy Myra May can be when she makes up her mind to something. She just wants you to know that we love you.”

  Lizzy’s defenses went down. “Oh, Verna!” she wailed, and buried her face in her friend’s shoulder. “It’s just so utterly awful! I can’t believe it’s happening.”

  “I know, I know,” Verna murmured, holding her close and patting her on the back. “What an awful jerk Grady is! I am so sorry for you, Liz.”

  Lizzy gulped back the tears. “Sorry for me? But, really, Verna, you should be—”

  The doorbell rang again. Verna turned to open the door and Lizzy saw Beulah Trivette and Bessie Bloodworth standing on the porch. Beulah was dressed in her prettiest flower-printed georgette dress and was carrying a gift-wrapped box in one hand and a bag of lemons in the other. Bessie, in her lace-trimmed blue crepe and her Sunday best hat, held a big bouquet of flowers.

  “We thought we’d just drop in and say hi, Liz,” Beulah said. With a soft smile, she held out the box. “I’ve brought you some of my lotions and creams and a special shampoo. And if you’ll come over to the Bower whenever it’s convenient, Bettina and I will give you our ultra-beauty treatment. There’s nothing like a little pampering to make a body feel better.” She handed the lemons to Verna. “For lemonade, Verna.”

  “And these are for you,” Bessie said, holding out the bouquet to Lizzy. “Peonies, of course, and hydrangea, and a few roses. The girls and I gathered them in the Dahlias’ garden.”

  Lizzy had to smile. “The girls” were Bessie’s boarders at Magnolia Manor. Not one of them was under sixty-five. She took the bouquet. “I don’t think I recognize these,” she said, fingering a spray of dark pink flowers.