* * *
Morning came softly to the Gulf Coast, tipping the waves with gold, rousing the terns from their nests along the beach and sending seagulls soaring across the water, looking for unsuspecting fish. After she’d hung up from talking to Emily, Sis threw back her sheet, slipped into sweat shorts, black T-shirt and gardening gloves, then tiptoed down the stairs.
Her sister had been wrong about Jim. He just wasn’t ready for public appearances, especially at the café where everybody knew him and would expect to hear a blow-by-blow account of his experiences in Vietnam. Sis decided to stick to the one thing she could control, fixing up the garden, bedraggled from a brutal summer of heat and bugs. The wedding was only weeks away.
Still, Sis didn’t mind the extra work. This was the part of the day she loved best, early morning when the dew was still on and she had the gardens to herself. Nature expected nothing of her. If she showed up to pull a few weeds and drench the beds with the water during dry spells, she was rewarded with prize-winning blossoms and tomatoes so big you could slice one and have plenty for five bacon and tomatoes sandwiches. If she didn’t show up, the resulting weeds became homes for the geckos and frogs Andy liked to catch and carry to the little frog houses he built all over the backyard with sticks and dirt.
It always amazed Sis that he expected the frog to be grateful, to set up housekeeping and be waiting when Andy stopped by later to ask how to catch flies with your tongue. Failing to get advice from a frog, he always turned to Sis.
Even if she didn’t have children of her own, Andy was the next best thing.
She eased the back door shut. Sweet Mama and Beulah were still asleep on the first floor, Sweet Mama in a big bedroom filled with mahogany furniture hauled from New Orleans in a wagon, and Beulah in a sunny room that had once belonged to Sis’s mother and daddy.
There had been no sounds coming from Jim’s room, either. Whether he was sleeping or lying on top of his covers with his eyes wide-open, Sis couldn’t say. All she could do was remember how he’d taken his duffel bag straight to his old room on the second floor last night, then shut the door.
Carrying the prosthetic leg he’d left in the umbrella stand downstairs, Sis had gone right in behind him.
“Don’t you ever knock?”
“You might as well not try your stinger on me, Jim Blake. I can still whip your butt.” She laid the prosthetic leg on the end of his bed. “I’m not going to let you shut yourself up here and have a pity party.”
“This is not pity, it’s a fact. If you want somebody to wear that leg, wear it yourself.”
“All right. Forget the leg for now. But don’t think I’m done. We lost Daddy and Mark to war, and I’m not going to lose you, too.”
“We lost Daddy in a car wreck.”
As if she didn’t know. Sis had turned and walked out of the room, the sound of crunching metal and the screams of her parents echoing through her mind. She’d been in that car, a teenager happy she didn’t have to stay home with the twins and Sweet Mama while her mother picked up Major Bill Blake at the bus station and brought him home for the holidays.
The driver who hit them was so drunk he didn’t see the red light, didn’t notice the car or the three people inside who were singing “White Christmas.” He never knew the look of surprise on Bill Blake’s face or the way Margaret Blake reached for her husband’s hand or the thoughts that tumbled through the head of a teenage girl flung clear of the wreckage. Sitting on the side of Highway 90 with her head hurting, Sis had checked her new red sweater set for damage.
What she should have been doing was checking her parents for a pulse, checking her future to see how she’d ever live with the guilt that she’d survived and they hadn’t.
Remembering, Sis jerked weeds out of the flower beds so hard she rocked back on her heels. She was not going to get mired down in the past and she most certainly wasn’t going to let her brother be one of those vets who returned from war but never really came home. The military had taken too much from her, and she was determined it would not take another single thing.
The back screen door popped, and Sweet Mama called, “Sis, can you help me with this?”
Her gardening gloves were on, her bonnet was askew and she was wrestling with a huge basket full of flowers. Plastic, for God’s sake. Sweet Mama wouldn’t be caught dead with a plastic flower in her house.
If Sis were Emily, she’d send up a petition to God, but she’d discovered if you wanted something, you’d best do it yourself.
“What in the world are you doing with plastic roses?”
“Shh, not so loud, Sis. I don’t want to wake that heifer.”
That heifer was Stella Mae Clifford. Sweet Mama marched to the edge of the yard and peered through the rose hedge toward the two-story Victorian house next door, a twin of theirs except it was painted yellow instead of pink.
Satisfied that her archenemy wasn’t about, she came back across the yard, chuckling, then plucked a pink plastic rose from the basket and secured it to the hedge with green gardening tape.
“Imagine that silly cow’s surprise when she wakes up and sees these on my rosebushes.”
Emily would die when she saw them. Still, Sis started taping plastic roses onto the nearly naked bushes.
“She’ll never believe you still have roses, Sweet Mama.”
“Yes, she will. She can’t half see.”
Black spot blight and aphids, enjoying the long stretch of intense heat and dry weather, had stripped every rosebush in Biloxi, including the hedge Sweet Mama was now decorating with plastic blossoms.
“Hurry up, Sis, before it gets daylight. We’ve got to get down to the café so I can put the coffee on for the regulars.”
“Emily can do that. Why don’t you and Beulah stay here and enjoy Jim’s first morning home? I think he could use the company.”
“Beulah’s in there now petting him like he’s three years old. Jim’s going to be all right. He’s like me. Made of strong stuff.” Sweet Mama plucked the last rose out of the basket and taped it to the disease-ravaged hedge. “Thank God he didn’t take after that jackass I married.”
There was a picture of their granddaddy on the walls at Sweet Mama’s, captioned simply The Jackass. Everybody knew it was Peter Blake, and everybody knew the story.
Sweet Mama had the misfortune to marry a man who was already married—to the bottle. Hardly an evening passed that he didn’t come home full of alcohol and bad attitude and smelling of another woman’s perfume.
After she had two boys, she made up her mind they’d not have Peter Blake as an example. One full moon when he came home sloshed and fell dead asleep into his bed, Sweet Mama went into the garden and pulled up two stout, dry cornstalks. Then she proceeded to tie her husband to the bed with the sheets and beat the devil out of him. When she’d whipped him sober, she packed his bags, threw them out the door and told him she didn’t want to ever see his sorry skinny self again.
Through the years he’d been spotted everywhere from Maine to California. The last they heard, he was up in Anchorage, Alaska. Wherever he was, that day he hightailed it was the last of Peter Blake in Biloxi and the beginning of Sweet Mama’s transformation from wife and mother to independent businesswoman, an unusual thing for a woman in 1921.
Some said Stella Mae Clifford was Peter Blake’s mistress, that he was the one who’d built her house next door. Once, Sis had asked Sweet Mama if the rumor was true.
“I like to keep people guessing, Sis. A juicy rumor is good for business. Better than a full-page ad in the newspaper.”
With the