The Hope Chest, page 3
“His name was Dow Jackson Devereaux,” Nessa explained. “I asked Nanny Lucy about it when D. J. passed away. D. J. and his brother both started out in law and had a firm together in the beginning. But the business about drove D. J. crazy, so he left it and began to do woodwork. Jackson’s father is James Edward, and he named his son after his brother. So now we have the second Dow Jackson Devereaux. He got tired of lawyer stuff, too, and just like his uncle he turned to woodworking.”
“I remember D. J. being very quiet but having kind eyes,” April said. “So he was D. J., and the nephew is Jackson. I wonder if the brother, James, ever regrets naming his son after D. J. Kind of marked him, didn’t it?”
“Maybe so,” Nessa answered.
Things like that did happen. Her parents’ strictness had sure enough marked her, and now she was having trouble figuring out what was rebellion and what was just plain old Irish stubbornness.
“I remember D. J. being kind of odd,” Flynn added. “Nanny Lucy said he was a recluse. When I was a little boy, she told me not to go to his house and bother him. I didn’t know what a recluse was in those days, but the word kind of scared me. His family must have loved him a lot since his brother named one of his kids after the old guy. Either of y’all ever meet this Jackson guy?”
Nessa and April both shook their heads.
“Maybe he’s a recluse as well,” Nessa said.
“Lord knows that place out there is a good place for hermits,” April said. “Only two houses, and both of them are at dead-end roads.”
Tilly brought out their food and refilled their glasses. She laid the ticket on the table and said, “I’ll be looking for your call. We need to catch up, Flynn.”
“He’s going to be very busy for the next few weeks,” Nessa said. “We’ve got lots to do out at Nanny Lucy’s place.”
Tilly laid a hand on her heart. “I loved that woman. She was in the quilting club with my granny and in the garden club with my aunt. May her sweet soul be resting in peace. I know she’d be so happy that you kids have come back to Blossom to live.” The door opened and she dropped her hand. “I’ve got more customers. I’ll be looking forward to seeing y’all real often here at Weezy’s.”
“Can either of you cook?” Flynn asked when Tilly was out of hearing distance. “I hope you can because I don’t intend to spend much time here.”
“I can open soup and make a pretty mean sandwich.” April picked up a piece of fish with her fingers and took a bite.
“I’m a fair cook, nothing gourmet,” Nessa answered. “Nanny Lucy lived by the goose and gander law, if I remember right, so you should be able to make grilled cheese sandwiches and heat up canned soup, just like us.”
“I can do a little better than that.” He squirted ketchup on his fries. “We’ll work out the duty schedule when we get to the house, and I’m sure we’ll have to make a run up to Paris to the grocery store this evening.”
So many decisions, Nessa thought. The idea that her two cousins would even consider staying around for a little while surprised her. She had thought she was coming halfway across the state to clean out the house and maybe hunt down a teaching job near here. She’d had no idea that April or Flynn, either one, would even stick around long enough to help her clean up the place. And since, under the terms of the will, the place could never be sold, she planned to at least spend every summer in Blossom.
One thing was for sure: if Nessa had to get married to inherit the hope chest that she had coveted since she was a little girl, there was no chance. She hadn’t had much luck with the dating game—seemed like she picked losers who cheated on her. So Flynn or April could have the hope chest, even if, after the way they’d treated Nanny Lucy, neither of them deserved it or a share of the property. They’d gotten to be around Nanny Lucy more than Nessa, and neither of them appreciated what they’d had.
What makes you think you’re so high above your cousins? the annoying voice in her head asked. Sure, you might have come around a little more through the years than they did, but maybe they had their reasons not to, just like you have yours for not wanting to spend much time with your folks.
Nessa had only gotten to see their grandmother for a couple of weeks in the summers and on the occasional holiday. After they were grown, neither Flynn nor April had spent as much time with Nanny Lucy as Nessa had, and Lord only knew she hadn’t done right by her grandmother, either.
They can have the hope chest, though, if it means getting married, she vowed as she dug into her chicken-fried steak. I’ve got to figure out who I am before I can even think about a relationship.
Chapter Two
April sucked in a lungful of air and let it out slowly as she parked her twenty-year-old Chevy in the front yard of the small house where she’d been raised. Miranda Lambert’s song “The House That Built Me” was playing on the radio. One line said that if she could just touch the place, the brokenness inside her might start healing. April liked the idea, but she couldn’t count all the fears and guilt trips that had been born in that house. Like an untreated sore, they had festered and become infected years and years ago, until now they were more like a cancer. She had known down deep in her heart that the only way she would ever be cured was by coming back to the house and facing the past. Maybe then she could begin to heal the way Miranda sang about in the song.
“How can it heal me when this is the place that broke me to begin with? I guess the only way to answer that question is to give it a try.” April sighed. “Am I coming back to mend the break or to make peace with the fact that it will never heal?”
More than a dozen years ago, when she was eighteen, she’d driven away in the same car that she’d come back to Blossom in that day. The vehicle had not had as many dings in it back then, and the upholstery had been in good shape. But the car, like the owner, had been through some rough times over the years. She’d driven away with high hopes of making it big and returning to Blossom to rub Nanny Lucy’s nose in her success. All she’d done was prove her grandmother right. God only knew she wasn’t in any better shape these days than the ripped seats in her vehicle.
She could get another job and start over like she’d done so many times, but that would just start the vicious cycle all over again. She would work awhile, get involved with a sorry excuse of a man, let him take advantage of her, and lose everything. It was like alcoholism or an addiction to gambling. Each time she would tell herself she was going to get it right this time, and yet she never did. Then, after the last time around, when she was down and out, she’d seen a quote on a plaque in a convenience store: “What you call rock bottom, I call rebirth.”
If it hadn’t cost almost ten dollars, she would have bought it and laid it on her dashboard. After that, every time she thought of the plaque, she wished she had purchased it.
She opened the car door, but since the air conditioner had quit years ago, there was no difference between the inside and outside air. “You told me when I left the day after high school graduation that you hoped I would have regrets about my decision. Well, you were right, and I do, Nanny Lucy. I just hope that this is the beginning of my rebirth process. This time around I will learn to love myself and get off this roller coaster of destruction.”
The last guy she’d let into her life had yelled, “You are the problem, not me!” as he stormed out of her apartment. That probably hadn’t been true in his case, but the words had stuck in her head, and she’d realized that until she learned to love and accept herself, she was never going to be at peace.
Flynn pulled his big, shiny black truck in on one side of her car, and Nessa parked her dark-blue SUV on the other.
“First step is always the hardest.” April put her feet on the ground, and an empty potato-chip bag flew out of the car. The wind carried it across the yard to hang up in the red rosebush right beside the porch steps. She carefully picked it out of the thorns, wadded it up, and shoved it into the pocket of her faded jeans.
This is me, she thought as she waited for Nessa to unlock the door. Empty, worthless, and trashy.
Stop it! the voice in her head scolded. It’s never too late to start all over. As long as you have breath in your lungs and a brain in your head, you can take the bull by the horns, spit in his eye, and make a new and better life for yourself.
“I hope so,” she muttered.
I was right about you, but you’ve still got time to prove me wrong before you die. It was the first time she’d heard Nanny Lucy’s voice in her head, and it startled her.
A musty, closed-up smell hit April in the face when she walked into the familiar living room. Very little had changed over the past decade. The same brown-and-orange floral sofa sat against the north wall, with a log-cabin quilt hanging behind it on an oak rod. The end tables were new, but the old entertainment unit with the television in the center was still straight ahead, and two wooden rockers flanked the sofa. Nanny Lucy had told her that she had rocked all three of her children and all three of her grandchildren in the burgundy one. She seemed proud of that fact, but April would just as soon that she had never rocked April or been responsible for her raising, either one. The green rocking chair had belonged to their grandfather, who had died six months before April’s mother was born. Nanny Lucy had said that he had died without even knowing that she was expecting a third child.
Nanny Lucy was only a little older than I am right now when her husband died, leaving her pregnant with my mother, and with two teenage boys to finish raising alone. No wonder she was so short-tempered, April thought. But I’ve seen other women who survived similar situations.
Nanny Lucy had either been happy, quilting until dawn and singing hymns, or else having one of her bad days, when it seemed like she begrudged April the very air she breathed. Flynn and Nessa seldom saw her on those horrible days, but when they left, April knew that one or maybe a whole week of them was bound to come around.
Flynn stopped in the middle of the floor and then began opening windows. “I’d forgotten that there’s not an air conditioner in this place. Would it be against the rules if I bought a couple of those small ones and hung them in the windows?”
“Can’t happen,” April said. “She tried to put one in the living room before I left, and the wiring in this place wouldn’t handle it. She took it back to the store and got her money back.”
“Well, I can fix that issue in a few days,” Flynn said.
“I thought you were a hotshot supervisor in the oil business these days,” Nessa said.
“I was until Nanny Lucy’s lawyer called with the news that Uncle Isaac’s case against the will had fallen through,” he said. “Now I’m just an unemployed guy who is a third owner of this hot house with no air-conditioning.”
“You quit your job over this?” Nessa waved her hand to take in the whole place.
“I needed a change anyway,” Flynn said, “and this gave me a good reason.”
Nessa grabbed a tissue from a box on the end table and wiped the sweat from her brow. “Daddy had his heart set on using this property for a religious retreat for his church deacons and the heads of his committees. He thought he might have to buy out Uncle Matthew to get it, so he’d already started a church donation fund to do that. The church owns a nice bus they could have used to transport the people from there to here, and Mama said he was thinking about setting up a fund for a little airplane.”
“Have you talked to him since . . . ?” April asked.
Nessa raised a shoulder in a shrug. “I’ve listened to him rant and rave about things, but lately I’ve been ignoring his calls. I got tired of hearing him yell about the unfairness of the court system,” she answered. Then she changed the subject. “Flynn, how do you know anything about rewiring a house?”
He shrugged. “I took classes for that kind of thing in vo-tech when I was in high school. Then I started at the bottom in the oil field business before I ever graduated. They had me doing everything from wiring to digging ditches.” Flynn opened more windows in the living room and dining area. “I learned how to do all kinds of electrical things as well as the regular oil business.” He returned with two oscillating fans and plugged them in.
“Are you going to use the money she left you to rewire the house?” Nessa asked.
“Yep, and then some of my own money to put an air conditioner in that window.” He pointed. “I came here to get my life in order. I don’t have to sweat to death while I’m doing it. Thank God it’s June first and not the middle of July or August when it feels like it’s seven degrees hotter than hell in this part of the world. I don’t mind the heat in the day. I got used to that back when I was working outside all the time, but I hate to sleep without cool air.”
“Want to elaborate on that business about getting your life in order?” April felt like her feet and legs were filled with concrete and she couldn’t move past the middle of the living room floor. Memories of the pain, both physical and mental, that she’d felt in the bedroom she’d used when she was growing up flashed through her mind. The switch across her legs, the guilt trips when Nanny Lucy told her how much she had sacrificed to give April a decent, God-fearing home, and the way the walls seemed to close in on her when she was put in her room for hours on end all flashed through her mind. She couldn’t make herself take a step toward that room. She’d forgotten that she’d even asked a question until she realized Flynn was talking.
“I do not want to talk about anything right now,” Flynn said. “We all three share DNA, but I don’t really know either of you. I hadn’t seen you”—he nodded toward Nessa—“in six or seven years before Nanny Lucy’s funeral.” He turned to focus on April. “And it must be ten years since I’ve seen you. So I don’t feel like baring my soul to either of you.”
“Fair enough,” April said. “I guess we’ll get to know each other pretty quick when we work on the quilt out in the shed, though, won’t we?”
“I’d like to go out there and take a look at it.” Nessa headed for the door. “And then I’m going to unpack. I suppose April and I will be sharing a room.”
“You can have the room.” April didn’t want to sleep in the room where she’d cried herself to sleep too many nights to count. “The sofa folds out into a bed, and it’s a lot more comfortable than sleeping in the back seat of my car or on the trundle bed in that room.” She didn’t even look down the short hallway toward the door leading into the room.
“Poor little April.” Nessa’s condescending tone was just short of pure whining.
April whipped around and pointed a finger only inches from Nessa’s nose. “Don’t judge me. You haven’t walked even a foot in my shoes, so you don’t get to talk down to me. Sometimes one person’s heaven is another person’s pure old hell.”
Nessa threw up her palms defensively. “All right. I won’t fight you for the sofa. I’d rather have it, since your old room just has a twin bed, but if you want to sleep in the living room, who am I to deny you that?”
“Before I’ll go in that room, I’ll go out to the quilting shed and use a sleeping bag. I’ve slept under the quilt frame plenty of times.” April marched through the living room, the dining area, and the kitchen and out the back door.
Nessa followed her. “We’re going to have to try to get along. This house isn’t big enough for us to hide from each other.”
“No, it’s not.” Flynn came out right behind them.
“You lived in a nice place with a lovely bedroom and two parents who loved you the whole time you were growing up, didn’t you, Nessa?” April hadn’t come to Blossom with intentions of being hateful or pouting. Like Flynn, she had come for a fresh start, and hopefully, to find closure, but dammit, Nessa had always known just which buttons to push to make her mad.
“Yep, and the church was close by if I really wanted to hide, or if I wanted to meet my boyfriend and make out in one of the Sunday-school classrooms,” Nessa said. “Let’s don’t get into the joys of being a preacher’s daughter.” She reached out and turned the knob on the door of the quilting shed, and the door opened. “I wonder why this door isn’t locked.”
“Probably because everyone in these parts was too afraid of Lucy O’Riley to ever even think about stealing one of her quilts,” Flynn said. “With her red-haired temper, she would have shot first and asked questions later. I guess she’s still got that shotgun in the house somewhere. Would you know where, April?”
“The shotgun is always loaded and under her bed, and her .38 revolver, loaded also, will be under her pillow. If you need to use them, just remember to cock the hammer,” April answered.
She had asked her grandmother once why she slept with a gun under her pillow and another one under her bed. Lucy had told her that one or both could take care of snakes, both the kind that slithered and the two-legged kind. Maybe that was where April had gone wrong. She never had a gun to take care of those two-legged varmints that seemed to be always taking advantage of her.
No! she fussed at herself. I’m here for that rebirth stuff, not to think about all the times I’ve failed in the past.
Chapter Three
Nessa walked around the edges of the patchwork quilt that was stretched on a wooden frame. She’d never tackled anything this big, and it was a little scary, especially when she thought about the Blossom Quilting Club passing judgment on the thing when they were finished. She remembered that two other women had made up the club with her grandmother, but it had been years since she’d seen them. Nanny Lucy had talked about them—Stella and Vivien—when Nessa called her.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Even after being closed up for six months, the shed still smelled like roses. Nanny Lucy had always kept a rose-scented candle burning on top of the filing cabinet in the corner. She glanced over that way, and sure enough, a large jar candle with three wicks was waiting to be lit. Nessa wondered if rose-scented sachets were still tucked away in Nanny Lucy’s dresser drawers, too.
