CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zed could hardly contain his excitement on Sunday morning. He awoke before five o’clock and lined the Easter baskets up in front of the chairs. “Just look at them, Annie. It’s been years since we got to make baskets for the girls. Pink is for Brook. She was wearing a pretty pink dress the first time Dana brought her to see us. I wonder what her daddy was like. I smell a rat in Dana’s story, but she’ll come around with what really happened one of these days.”
It took two trips to get the baskets from his quarters at the back of the store to the café. Harper always arrived first, so he put the one with a pretty little red stuffed bunny toward the front. He made coffee and fidgeted, eager for them to get there so he could see their faces. Annie would want to know every detail. At the end of her life when she couldn’t remember very well, she’d beg him to tell her stories about the girls. Some days he’d kneel in front of her and repeat the same things he’d told her the day before. When she laughed, the clouds parted and he could swear that the angels in heaven were sweepin’ the floors and gettin’ ready for her.
He couldn’t be still another minute, so he pulled on a jacket and went outside to sit on the bench. Harper’s light was on, so she would be there in a few minutes. He lit up a cigarette and shook his head slowly. “I know, darlin’, but it’s too late to quit now, and besides, if I had ten more years, I’d spend them miserable without you, so don’t fuss at me. Aha! I believe that’s Wyatt’s truck.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And he’s leavin’ something on the porch. Well, now, that’s a step in the right direction, ain’t it?”
Sunday morning was just like every other day of the week. Harper got up before daylight, dressed, and twirled her hair up into a ponytail and headed over to the café. But she stopped in her tracks when she opened the door. Sitting right there on the porch was a gorgeous bouquet of red roses with a big chocolate Easter bunny propped up beside it.
“Zed.” She reached for the card but was surprised when she saw the handwriting.
Sorry I left in a hurry. My friend’s wife wanted me to help make arrangements, and truthfully, I didn’t know what else to say or do. My heart hurts for you. I’ll call this afternoon. Until then, happy Easter—Wyatt.
The first thing she did was check to see if either of her sisters was nearby. With them nowhere in sight, she grabbed up the vase and chocolate and took them into her cabin. She sank her nose into the roses and inhaled deeply and then removed the foil from around the bunny and bit off an ear.
Still savoring the taste of the chocolate, she headed toward the café. Zed stood up from the bench when she arrived and chuckled. “Guess you found your first Easter surprise. Wyatt put it out there about fifteen minutes ago and then drove away. I reckon he’s havin’ to come to terms with all this.”
“I reckon so.”
Zed dropped his cigarette into a cigarette-disposal thing that looked like a pipe stuck down in a milk bucket. He opened the door for her and switched on the lights as soon as he was inside.
She stopped and giggled, despite herself, at the sight of four big baskets filled with candy and all kinds of surprises lined up on the table.
“Uncle Zed, that is the sweetest thing.” Harper hugged him. “But you shouldn’t have. I didn’t get you a single thing for Easter. And when on earth did you manage to get all that stuff?”
His face fairly well lit up the whole place in a big grin at her surprise. “Yeah, you did. You are here and that’s what Annie wanted, so it’s the best Easter present in the whole world. I go to town on Sunday night after we close up every week to get my weekly supply of cigarettes and my bottle of blackberry wine. Annie was partial to that when we ran out of elderberry wine. While I’m there, I been droppin’ in to Walmart to get the stuff for the baskets. Go on and open yours up. There’s a little bottle of Jack down in the bottom, because I know you like it.” He winked.
“I threw my last bottle at the wall in a fit of anger and busted it all over the place,” she admitted as she tore into the basket and ate a chocolate egg.
“Guess that’s why you needed cleaner from Flora, right?”
Her head bobbed, and it took three swallows to get the chocolate to go down past the lump forming in her throat. “I’ll never get to make a basket for her, Uncle Zed.”
“Maybe someday you’ll have another baby and you can make Easter baskets for that one.” He walked away from the coffee machine and threw an arm around her shoulders.
“I don’t deserve another baby.”
“Maybe you deserve one even more. You were wise enough to realize you were too young to make a good home for the one you had.” He hugged her even tighter and then went back to the business of making coffee.
Harper wanted to believe Zed, she really did, but she’d lived with the guilt so long that it was impossible.
“Easter baskets!” Tawny squealed when she arrived. “Who did this? Brook?”
“Nope, Uncle Zed did.” Harper wrapped the long strings of an apron around her waist a couple of times and tied it in the front. She shoved an order pad and pen in one pocket and set about making sure all the napkin dispensers were filled.
Zed’s head poked through the window. “The purple one is for you, Tawny. Yellow for Dana, pink for Brook.”
“Mine is red and it’s in the kitchen, so y’all won’t steal my little bottle of Jack that Zed tucked in,” Harper said.
Tawny carefully removed the cellophane and folded it, hugged the purple bunny to her chest, and then kissed it on the nose. “You can keep that. Look at all this chocolate! Man, I’m going to gain ten pounds and I don’t even care.” Tawny ran from the dining area to the kitchen and wrapped Zed into a bear hug that almost knocked his frail body on the ground. “I love you, Uncle Zed. I haven’t had an Easter basket since I was a little girl. The last one might have been back when we got to come here one year for spring break.”
“Yep, you were five, and Dana had just gotten out of high school the year before. Annie was afraid she’d be offended by an Easter basket, but I insisted that we make her one anyway.” Zed grinned.
“You have a sense of fairness about you that I love.”
“Just the way my mama taught me to be.” His smile got even wider. “Now I got to get breakfast goin’. You get on out there and eat up some of that chocolate to keep you from starvin’ before I get it cooked up.”
“You ain’t goin’ to have to twist my arm to do that. Is that cinnamon rolls I smell in the oven?”
“It’s Easter. That’s the special thing for today,” Zed said. “We won’t have a lot of customers until dinner, and then they’ll all flock in here like ducks on the lake for their blue-plate special.”
Tawny was taking each item out of her basket and setting it on the table when Dana and Brook arrived. She and Harper both giggled when Brook’s hand clamped over her mouth and she did a little dance right inside the café.
“Easter baskets!” Her squeals bounced off the walls. “Look how big they are. Is the pink one mine? Who made them?”
Zed came out of the kitchen and leaned on the counter. Tawny loved the expression on his face when Brook grabbed up the one with her name on it. It was the happiest she’d seen him since before Granny Annie passed on. She started to tear up but swallowed hard and kept it at bay. Zed needed a happy day, and she’d do her best to give him one.
She raised her voice to get over Brook’s squeals as she found her bunny and treats. “Uncle Zed did that for us. Pretty special, huh?”
“I’m going to name my bunny Miss Jo after Granny,” Brook yelled even though Dana was right beside her. “And look at all this chocolate and Peeps. I love Peeps.”
“Uncle Zed, this is too much,” Dana said. “But I love you for doing it. You and Granny made the last one I had, but I was already out of high school at that time. Thank you so much.”
“You girls sure make an old man feel good this mornin’. Happy Easter to the bunch of you,” he said and then went back to work.
The other shoe was going to fall any minute. Dana’s life was living proof that it would. The morning had started off beautifully, with the baskets designed special for each of them and then the gooey, hot cinnamon rolls straight from the oven. But good things did not last forever.
Her last job had proven that beyond the old proverbial shadow of a doubt. She’d thought that she’d stay on the ranch until Brook graduated from high school, but everything fell apart on Valentine’s Day when the boss’s wife came out to her apartment with the pink slip.
“You’ve got two weeks to get out,” she’d said.
“Why?” Dana was so shocked that one word was the limit that morning.
“Two reasons. You are stealin’ from us and you’ve been sleepin’ with my husband,” her boss, Linda, had said.
“I am not,” she’d argued.
“I believe you are, and I will not ever give you a recommendation for another job. I just want you and that kid of yours gone.” Linda had spun around and stormed back to the house.
It didn’t take long to figure out that she was the scapegoat for a crooked foreman who was the real culprit, but he was Linda’s cousin, so she’d never believe that he would do something like rustle a few cattle or take kickbacks from an artificial breeder. And the bit about Dana sleeping with a sixty-eight-year-old man was ridiculous. He was older than her father would have been if Gavin Clancy was alive. But she did find out that he was indeed cheating on Linda with a friend of hers, who’d probably passed the buck when Linda had gotten suspicious.
“Thank you, God, for Granny’s love and for this job and house,” she whispered as she raised her eyes toward the ceiling.
“Hello, Dana.” A masculine voice came from the front of the store.
She had a definite new spring in her step as she rounded the end of the minnow tank, expecting to see Payton bringing in a new bait supply. But it was Marcus standing in front of the counter with a big smile on his face.
“Happy Easter. Are you going to put these chocolate bunnies on sale? If you do, save them all for me to take home to my mother. She loves them,” he said with a heavy wink.
“Hadn’t planned on dropping the price on them. There’s only about ten left, and they’ll probably go today.” She’d buy them at full price and take them to the house before she sold them to him. No way would she encourage him to flirt with her or with Tawny. Good Lord! He was graduating from high school when Tawny was in first grade.
“I thought I’d enjoy my quiet time a lot more than I am. I actually miss my cat and my mother, so I’m checkin’ out early and goin’ on home this mornin’. I called Mama and told her that I’d take her to church and we’d go eat at her favorite little Mexican place after services. I asked Tawny if she’d like to join us, but she said she had to work,” he said. “Did you have a talk with her, Dana?” His tone was far from friendly.
“I told her the same thing I told you. There’s too much of an age difference.” She felt like she was stepping into the role of Tawny’s mother instead of a sister, and she didn’t like it at all.
“I’d say that’s for her to decide.” Marcus tilted his chin up a notch.
“Probably, but it’s my right to express my opinion. I’ve got work to do, if you’ll excuse me,” she said.
Marcus’s mouth set in a firm line, and his eyes went cold. “Mama always said that you’d turn out as wild as your mother and that your grandmother got crazy after her husband died. I guess she had that brain tumor for years.”
Dana had visions of drowning him in the minnow tank and then burying his body back in the wooded area behind the house. Harper would help her for sure and probably Tawny, too, even if she still thought that Marcus had mesmerizing blue eyes.
“You want to say that to Uncle Zed?” Dana said through clenched teeth.
“I hear that Zed was the reason she quit going to church,” Marcus said.
“Enough.” Dana put up a palm so close to his face that she could feel his breath. “Granny Annie had wings and a halo and walked on water, so please just go.”
Marcus took a step back. “I’m just statin’ facts that you already know. I’ll be seein’ you around.” He spun and left the store in a hurry.
His car had barely gotten out of sight when Tawny popped into the store. “Was that Marcus leaving? He checked out early with a song and dance about not wanting his mother or cat to spend the holiday alone. Was he in here asking you to go to church with them?”
Dana shook her head slowly. “He’s stinging because we’ve both turned him down and slinging insults at Granny and me because of it.”
“That son of a bitch,” Tawny fumed. “Is he crazy? No one talks smack about Granny Annie and lives to see the light of day. I’ll get some concrete blocks, and we’ll sink his sorry ass in the middle of the lake.”
“This from the sister who thought his eyes were pretty?” Dana’s tone was edgy, but she needed a good solid fight to ease her anger. They’d only vowed to be nice when Zed was around, and he was in the café.
“They’ll be even prettier as they bug out when we throw his body over the edge of a boat. What’d he say about you?”
Dana shrugged. “That his mama figured I’d turn out wild like my mother. Nothing I haven’t heard before.”
She’d never overcome the fact that she was a bastard child—not in that area of Texas where everyone knew everything about everyone and didn’t mind shouting it from the rooftops. Her two sisters might have a bitchy mother, but at least they’d had both parents.
Shame on you! Granny had told her when she’d whined about the same thing when she was fourteen. You’ve got beauty, brains, and a family. I won’t hear you feelin’ sorry for yourself.
“That settles it. We’ll drown his cat with him.” The anger in Tawny’s statement brought her back to reality.
It started as a weak giggle and developed into full-fledged laughter that Dana couldn’t control. “What’d the cat do?” she said between hiccups.
“It had the misfortune of belonging to him,” Tawny said. “Next time he wants to come to our cabins, I’m going to infest his sheets with bedbugs. I’ll figure out where I can buy them online.”
A cold chill chased down Dana’s spine. “He’s one of Brook’s teachers. You don’t think he’d be ugly to her in class because we both rejected him, do you?”
Tawny’s eyes went to slits. “That had better never happen, or else the next time the drug dogs come around, they’ll find a bag of pot in his desk.”
“You wouldn’t!” Dana gasped.
“He’d best leave my niece alone is all I got to say.” Tawny picked up a bag of chips. “Put this on my bill. I need something salty to combat all that wonderful chocolate and those cinnamon rolls. And I might want to scratch your eyes out most of the time, Dana, but believe me, when it comes to Brook, I will go the distance with you.”
“Thank you,” Dana said sincerely. “So you still wouldn’t go the distance for me?”
“Depends on what or who we are fighting,” Tawny said as she left.
Tawny had only been gone a couple of minutes when Payton came in with a cartload of minnows and bait for the refrigerator. “Happy Easter,” he called out as he backed inside the store. “Looks like it’s goin’ to be a lovely day to hide eggs for children. I miss doing that for my daughter. You got any little kids?”
“My daughter is fourteen,” Dana answered. “A little too old to hunt eggs, but she still likes to get an Easter basket.”
He dumped an order of minnows into the tank. “I got a lot of extra hugs this mornin’ when my daughter saw her basket in the car. I don’t know if she really loves me or if she loved those half a dozen gift certificates to her favorite restaurants.”
Dana craned her neck around to see if he wore a wedding band, but his hands were covered by the cart. Surely a guy that sexy and with those eyes had a wife. When he brought her a ticket, she heaved a visible sigh of relief to see that there wasn’t even an imprint of a ring on his left hand.
“Did the husband come with you to the lake?” he asked as he peeled the top copy of the ticket off for her to keep.
“Divorced for more than ten years,” she answered.
“Widowed for more than ten years,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She looked up into his eyes. “So you raised your daughter alone?”
“Yep, my parents were gone and I’m an only child, so I didn’t have any support. But we managed to make it through her teenage years without too much damage to either of us,” he chuckled.
“Got any secrets you want to share?” she asked.
“Lots of them. Even got the ten rules of dating my daughter written down. I’ll be glad to share them if you’ll go to dinner with me some time,” he said. “Like maybe tomorrow night after you finish up here? I could pick you up at seven thirty.”
She meant to shake her head, but she nodded. “I’ll be ready.”
“Good. I’ll see you then. And I’ll bring a copy of those rules with me.”
When his delivery truck pulled away, she slid down the back of the counter and put her hands over her eyes. She hadn’t dated in so long that she might have to drag out a manual on how to act on a date after the age of thirty.