CHAPTER NINE
“This is harassment, Luke,” I snapped. “You’ve had officers watching us all day, and now this. You know I didn’t do anything wrong. I expected better from you.”
Guilt flashed in his eyes, but his anger flared up as quickly as an Alabama thunderstorm. “You’re disrupting my town. You blew in like a tornado and disrupted my life twelve years ago, and here you are disruptin’ it again.”
I searched deep for an ember of anger to stoke, anything that would overtake the pain that was about to make me burst into tears. “I have no intention of disrupting your life again. That’s not why I’m here.”
“I’m the damn police chief, Summer. You’re disruptin’ the town, which means you’re disruptin’ me.” He turned away. “If I had my way, I’d kick your whole damn circus out of the city limits, but your producer promised something to Mayor Sterling and swayed the whole city council, and now I’m hamstrung.”
That perked up my interest. “Promised what?”
“Probably money for that stoplight he’s wanting on Oak Street, but that’s not the point . . .”
I cocked my head, wondering if I was onto something. “Is he open to bribes?”
He winced and gave me a look that told me exactly what he thought of me nosing into the town’s affairs. “What?”
“Is Mayor Sterling open to bribes? Or likely to be involved in something shady? I saw him doing something suspicious behind Maybelline’s Café today, then this afternoon I saw a guy drop—”
“Am I on your damn show?” He spun around and glanced over his shoulder, then back at me. “I told that damn producer I wanted no part of it. She does not have my permission to put me on camera.”
“What are you talking about?”
He took a step closer to me, his jaw clenched tight as he glared at me. “Am I being recorded right now?”
My eyes widened in shock. “No. I just—”
“This is not your town anymore, Summer,” he said. “For all your pretty words about leaving your Hollywood life behind, you never came back. You have no business being here, and you certainly have no business stirrin’ shit up.”
“I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be,” I said, finally finding my temper and hanging on to it like a drowning woman. I advanced toward him, looking up into his anger-filled eyes. “But this is where I was born and raised for the first fourteen years of my life. This is my damned town too, so you can stuff it!”
His eyes narrowed as he took several steps backward, but sorrow had replaced most of his anger. “You never wanted to be here. Not even when you claimed you did. So why are you here now? After all these years?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said, nearly cringing when I realized how pathetic I sounded. “I know that doesn’t help, but there it is.”
He glanced toward the police station. “So you really don’t want to be here.”
While I’d staunchly resisted the idea of coming back, now that I was here, I was ready to face everything I’d done wrong head-on, and the way things had gone down with Luke was one of my biggest regrets.
I started to contradict him, but he turned back to face me, and the pain in his eyes stole my breath. “For nearly two years, I waited for you.” He moved closer until he was standing over me, his anger returning, blending with his pain. “Then your grandfather died, and I was sure you’d come back for his funeral, but hell no, you were too damned selfish for that. I believed you, Summer. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. For all your talk, you’re no different than your mother.”
I gasped. We might have broken up almost a decade ago, but he obviously still knew how to hurt me. “I was young and stupid, and I did a lot of things I deeply regret.”
“Save it for the camera. The sooner you leave Sweet Briar, the better. I plan to do everything in my power to get you out of here before you cause any lasting damage.”
“Damage to you or the town?” I asked in a strangled voice.
He shook his head. “You have no power to hurt me anymore. I gave up that ghost nine years ago.” But the look on his face suggested that was a lie.
I stood there, watching in shock as he got in his police car and drove out of the lot. This felt like one embarrassment too many, and I was sure there were plenty more humiliations to come.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
I got back in the truck, turning onto County Road 95 out of a habit I hadn’t used in twelve years. It was time to face my grandmother. But first I was going to see Pawpaw.
Until I was six, my mother and I had lived with my grandparents. We moved out after she married Burt, but I’d still spent a lot of time with Meemaw and Pawpaw while Momma and Burt were in their “honeymoon stage.” Not that I’d minded. My headstrong, stubborn mother had always been challenging, and my whole life had been driven by the sheer force of her personality. Until Momma moved us away when I was fourteen, my grandfather had been my rock, my lifeline—the one thing anchoring me.
I’d never seen his grave, but my mother had told me that he was buried in the family cemetery on the land his family had owned since 1823. Most people weren’t buried on family land these days, but my grandfather and the land had had a symbiotic relationship. I couldn’t imagine him leaving it, even in death.
The family cemetery was off the lane to the farmhouse, about fifty feet from the country road but still far enough from the house that I could stop and pay my respects without being seen by anyone inside.
One homecoming at a time.
I parked on the side of the gravel road and got out of the truck, then leaned my butt against the side of the closed driver’s-side door, closing my eyes and breathing deep, taking in the sweet fragrance of the magnolia tree next to the graveyard. When I was seven, Pawpaw told me why he’d planted it: It was so beating hot in the summer, the people buried in the earth used to get up at night and walk to the creek that ran through the Baumgartner property about two hundred feet to the north for a cold drink of water. He figured if he could cool off the graves, they’d stay put. According to him, it had worked . . . for half the occupants. The ones remaining in the sun still made their nightly trek.
His story had scared me half to death, and that night I had refused to go to sleep, terrified a ghost would get confused and come into the house looking for a drink of water. Meemaw, fit to be tied, had made him tell me the truth—that he’d planted it to have a cool place to sit and rest a spell while working in the cotton fields next to the cemetery.
Whatever his reasons for planting it, the tree had thrived. It was now at least fifty feet tall and a good thirty to forty feet wide. I wondered if it covered Pawpaw’s grave, or if he’d joined the wanderers in their search for water. There was only one way to find out.
I walked across the gravel drive, trying to figure out the best path. Pawpaw had been faithful about keeping the grounds maintained, but Teddy was clearly not as discerning. Weeds had sprouted up around the markers, some of which were so old the names and dates had worn away. But Pawpaw’s was easy to spot—a red-and-black granite headstone topped by a cherub . . . obviously the work of my mother. Pawpaw would have hated it.
I allowed myself a little laugh when I realized his grave was in the sun, especially since the two graves next to it were in the shade—Stanley and Merilee Baumgartner. I wasn’t surprised to see that their headstones were much simpler. My mother never could stand her sister-in-law and had been mostly estranged from her brother because of it.
I stomped on the weeds, trying to make a path to the graves. As I got closer, I noticed a bundle of yellow tulips tied up with twine at the base of Merilee’s headstone. Dixie had always loved yellow tulips.
I ran my fingers over the etched stone on Pawpaw’s grave. It still haunted me that I had missed their funerals. I had my mother to blame for that too, but that decision had been the beginning of the end. Soon after, I told her no for the first time and stuck to my guns. That, I couldn’t regret.
I knelt on the ground, ignoring the fact that I was probably staining my jeans. I closed my eyes and summoned up his memory, this man I’d dared to love more than my own mother. His death had been my greatest loss. No one else had shown me such unconditional love. Once, I had believed my grandmother loved me that way too, but she’d been quick to turn her back on me in the end. Pawpaw was the only one who’d understood that the life my mother had picked for me was not of my choosing—a reality that had caused a huge rift between the two of them.
I sucked in a deep breath, the scent of the magnolia blossoms overhead filling my nose with a sweet scent better than any perfume, and told myself that wallowing never did any good. I could wallow all I wanted, but my problems would still be waiting for me. I needed to suck it up and face the music.
The farmhouse was another couple hundred feet farther down the gravel lane. Even though I hadn’t been back here since the summer I was seventeen, it still felt so much like home. I knew I was close when the trees began to line the road. Pawpaw had planted those too—forty poplar trees, twenty on either side—saying the Baumgartner House rivaled any plantation in Gone with the Wind. In truth, my grandparents’ home more closely resembled a sharecropper’s house, but that hadn’t deterred my grandfather’s visions of greatness.
Instead of bolstering the home’s image, the trees seemed to mock it, to draw the eye to how small and worn it looked.
This house had been built in 1864, rebuilt after the original had been burned down in the Civil War. Pawpaw said that before the war, the house had been finer, but there hadn’t been enough money to rebuild it to its previous glory. Now it was a four-bedroom, two-bath home that hadn’t seen a remodel this century . . . unless it had happened since my last visit, which seemed unlikely, as I was making the mortgage payments due to hard times.
I parked in front of the house, cringing when I saw the cars and trucks belonging to the production staff. I was probably going to see my grandmother for the first time in years in front of cameras.
Great. Still, there was no denying it was this show that had drawn me back home, and now that I was here, I could use this opportunity to try to fix things. Or at least apply a few patches.
I got out and walked up to the porch. The amount of blooming bulb flowers near the front door could have rivaled Holland; it looked like the pansies had exploded. My grandmother had never been one to waste time on planting flowers, so I couldn’t help wondering who’d taken the trouble to buy and arrange them.
When I reached the front door, I hesitated, then reached out and rapped loudly.
Dixie answered with a huge grin. She’d changed out of her shorts into a simple sleeveless blue dress. “You made it.”
The smell of Meemaw’s cooking rolled out of the door, and nostalgia stole my breath, reminding me of the happiest moments in my life—living here. “Yeah.”
“Dixie?” a woman called out from the kitchen. “Is that her?”
My grandmother.
My stomach seized with nerves. Meemaw had always had a temper, but Pawpaw used to cool her down. Had anyone taken over that responsibility after his death?
“Yes, ma’am,” Dixie hollered back. “I’m gonna help her with her bags.”
“My bags?” I asked in confusion.
“Lauren says you’re stayin’ here, so I figured it would be easier to bring your stuff in now.”
Staying here. That made sense, especially if the producers were looking for drama, but the thought made me quake in my shoes.
“I think I should go in and say hi to her,” I said.
Dixie shook her head and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her. “She’s in the middle of cookin’. You’ll just tick her off.”
Meemaw had always hated people coming into her kitchen when she was cooking. Dixie was right. If I wanted to start out on the right foot, I needed to wait . . . even if my heart ached a bit that she hadn’t rushed out to greet me.
We walked down the steps and toward the back of the truck. I gestured to the multiple cars parked by the side of the house. “Why is Meemaw allowing all of this?”
“Well . . . she’s none too happy, but Lauren promised her a new fence along the western property line. Seein’ how we couldn’t figure out how to scrape up the money for it, she agreed.”
I started walking again. “Is she pissed at me?”
Dixie’s mouth pursed, and she gave me a long look before she said, “We sure are havin’ some great weather. Should be good for stakeouts, huh?”
Shit.
Two weeks. That’s all I had to endure, then I could go back to . . . what? My salary for the show would help out, certainly, but it wouldn’t save my house. So, I’d return just in time to pack up my life and go . . . where? One step at a time.
We lugged the suitcases up the few steps on the porch. They weighed close to fifty pounds each, but Dixie carried the second one with hardly any trouble at all.
Once we rolled them across the threshold, I noticed the production crew in the living room setting up for another shoot. Dinner.
Dixie practically pushed me toward the hallway off the living room. “Teddy and I have the bedrooms upstairs, so you get the bedroom in the back.”
“You haven’t considered moving out?” I asked. Dixie was twenty-five, and Teddy was a year younger than I was.
She gave me a look of surprise. “Why would we leave? Teddy runs the farm, and I help Meemaw with the house. Plus, the pay at the Dollar General was crap. I can’t afford to live anywhere else.” She pushed me down the short hall. “Meemaw’s still in the front bedroom, so you two will share a bathroom.”
We walked into the living room, which was on the front left side of the house, and at first glance it looked like nothing had changed. I could see into the dining room and hoped to catch a glimpse of my grandmother through the swinging door into the kitchen, but Dixie headed me toward the right. The main living areas took up the west side of the house, but the two bedrooms and a bathroom took up the east side.
My grandmother’s bedroom was in the front, and I almost gasped aloud when Dixie steered me past the bathroom and into the back bedroom. It hadn’t changed one bit. It was big enough to comfortably hold a full-size bed, a chest of drawers, and a chair. Just like I remembered, the white wrought-iron bed was covered in a pink-and-white quilt with multiple images of a girl wearing sunbonnets. I used to love that quilt when I was a kid.
Truth was, the back bedroom had been my room.
Tears stung my eyes. My grandmother had kept everything exactly the same. If she was pissed at me, why hadn’t she changed it? Was it because she’d always hoped I would come back or because she was too frugal to get new bedding?
“Dixie Belle Baumgartner!” I heard my grandmother shouting on the other side of the door. “You two need to come out to dinner.”
I found it interesting that she hadn’t used my name yet, not once. Maybe she was waiting until she saw me face-to-face. But if I heard her so clearly, that meant she was out of the kitchen.
Dixie grabbed my hand and squeezed. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
I followed my cousin into the dining room, my breath coming in shallow pants. Half of me was dying to see her, and the other half was terrified of being rejected. Again.
I heard my grandmother before I saw her. She was shooing the crew out of the way as she set out the food.
“If you’re gonna film this, then you better be ready to get on with it,” she said in a no-nonsense tone. “My food’s about to get cold.”
“We’re waiting on our other camera guy,” Tony said.
“Well, he better get here fast,” she snapped.
I didn’t have time to prepare myself, but maybe there was no preparing for some things. Either way, she was there in front of me before I was ready for her. I was surprised by how much older she looked. She was only sixty-eight, but the deep wrinkles on her face made her look well into her seventies. All that sun from working out in the fields with her husband. Her salt-and-pepper hair was silver now, and she looked shorter, probably because she was slightly stooped over. Still, her gray eyes were just as alert as I remembered them—never missing a thing.
“Summer Lynn,” she said, looking me up and down, “you’re too skinny.”
That was such a Meemaw thing to say I would have laughed if I hadn’t been so nervous. “I suspect one night at your dinner table will fix that.”
She remained in place, looking like she was about to say something before she pressed her lips together.
“I missed you, Meemaw,” I nearly whispered. “It’s good to be home.”
She made a guttural sound and waved to the table. “Dinner’s getting cold. Sit down.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen.
All in all, this could have gone worse. I was going to call it a win.
I glanced at the table, not surprised to see a spread. My grandmother was known far and wide for her cooking, and she’d always relished the opportunity to cook for other people. I counted the place settings and glanced at Dixie. “Four. Teddy’s coming, right?” I asked hopefully.
“He wouldn’t miss it. He ran to the feed store for a bit. He’s eager to see you.”
My aunt and uncle had lived in a mobile home on the farm, and since I had spent so much of my own childhood here, Teddy and I had practically grown up together. We’d been close up until I left when I was fourteen. We’d tried to keep in touch, but Teddy had never been one to talk on the phone, and we’d soon grown apart. Being here made me realize how much I had missed him. “I’m eager to see him too.”
It felt like I was sitting in a spotlight, all my failings and worries, hopes and fears exposed. Then I looked up at the ceiling and realized that was literally true. It was a tangle of steel beams and wires holding up lights.
“Those damned lights,” Meemaw said as she pushed through the swinging door with a plate of what looked like country-fried steak. Had she made it because she knew it was my favorite? She set it on the table next to the bowls of mashed potatoes, gravy, and collard greens.
“For the show?” I asked in surprise.
“Yep.”
I wanted to apologize, but she’d already disappeared into the back. It occurred to me that it wasn’t right for Meemaw to run back and forth from the kitchen while we stood around like toads on a log. She’d always put us to work when we were younger. “Shouldn’t we help her?” I asked my cousin.
Dixie lowered her voice. “She won’t let me help. She says the kitchen is her kingdom.”
My grandmother returned a few seconds later holding a white ceramic pitcher. “What in the Sam Hill are you two doin’ still standin’ there? Sit down. Are ya deaf?”
“No, ma’am,” Dixie said, sounding contrite, but she shot me a surreptitious grin.
“Is there a particular place you want me to sit?” I asked, glancing around the table. It had been built by my great-great-grandfather and was designed to hold fourteen people comfortably. The four place settings were on the end closest to the kitchen—two spots facing another two. The end of the table was left empty.
My grandfather’s spot.
Meemaw set the pitcher on the table and gestured to the side of the table opposite her.
“You can’t start dinner yet,” Lauren said, walking through the front door. “We’re still waiting on our other cameraman. You said you were serving dinner at seven, and it’s only six fifty-five.”
Meemaw’s eyes narrowed. “This is my house, and we eat when I say we do. If you don’t like it, then tough.” She glared at Dixie before shifting her gaze to me. “Sit.”
I quickly took my seat while Dixie sat across from me. Meemaw sat next to her.
“Let’s say grace,” Meemaw said, lifting her hands.
“Don’t start without me!” I heard a man call out from the kitchen.
The guy who rushed in from the swinging door looked like a much younger version of my grandfather. My mouth gaped open when I saw him, but a huge grin spread across his face.
Teddy was all grown up and extremely good-looking, but he didn’t have the arrogant air a lot of good-looking guys had.
“Summer!” I stood, and he pulled me into a bear hug. “I can’t believe you’re home. I hope you’re considering stayin’—the Baumgartner cousins all together again.”
He wanted me to stay? A lump filled my throat, and I cast a glance toward Meemaw, but she waved her hand. “We’re not talkin’ about that. Not tonight.” She shot a glare at Lauren.
But Lauren was too busy grinning at Teddy to notice. Probably because his good looks would be great for ratings. I suspected she would figure out ways to insert him into the show any chance she got.
“Teddy,” she said in the nicest voice she’d used all day, “would you mind coming back into the room just like you did a moment ago?”
“Why?” he asked in confusion.
“So we can film it.”
Bill hurried through the front door. Lauren looked furious with him, but her expression completely transformed after he walked over to her and whispered something in her ear. After a couple of seconds, she shot me a pleased glance.
What was that about?
“Get set up, Bill,” Lauren said. “We’re rolling.”
Teddy made his entrance two more times before Meemaw started cursing about her dinner getting ruined. Lauren gave the all clear for dinner to carry on.
Meemaw said grace—with everyone holding hands—and we had finally started dishing food onto our plates when a knock landed on the front door.
Dixie gave Teddy and Meemaw a questioning glance. “Did you invite someone else?”
“Don’t look at me,” Meemaw barked.
Teddy shook his head. “Wasn’t me this time.”
“Hello,” a voice called out from the living room. “Did you start without us?”
I froze. No. It can’t be.
But it was. Standing in the dining room doorway was my mother.