What Matters in Mayhew (The Beanie Bradsher Series Book 1) Read online

  What Matters in Mayhew

  by Cassie Dandridge Selleck

  Obstinate Daughters Press

  Copyright © 2016 by Cassie Dandridge Selleck

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof

  may not be reprinted in any form without permission.

  What Matters In Mayhew is a work of complete fiction.

  Names, businesses, places, and events are either products

  of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any

  resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Published by Obstinate Daughters Press

  Lady Lake, Florida 32158

  The text of this book is set in Book Antiqua.

  Book design by Patricia C. Walker

  Cover photography by C. D. Selleck

  Also by Cassie Dandridge Selleck

  The Pecan Man

  For my mother, Patricia Veazey Dandridge,

  whose voice resonates in my work and in my heart.

  I miss you, Mama.

  Acknowledgements

  When I speak of the many wonderful souls who have guided, cajoled, loved, tolerated and supported me through the process of writing this novel, it is usually difficult to decide who to thank first. This time, it’s easy. This book would not be a shadow of its current self without the hard work, stellar editing, and incredible insight of Patricia C. Walker, Senior Editor of Obstinate Daughters Press and Senior Instructor in Speech, Communication and Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina. The fact that she is also my firstborn child is just a bonus, and I am profoundly grateful on all counts.

  Thanks also to daughters Emily Selleck and Kathryn P. Emily, who are also strong members of our new publishing team, not to mention beautiful, smart and super-talented women in their own right. I have been blessed. Side note: Daughter Emily Selleck was four years old when her big sister Katie met Bobby Emily and henceforth made our name situation even more wonky than usual for a Southern family.

  Thanks to my writing group, Gainesville Poets and Writers in Gainesville, Florida, for your inspiring critiques and limitless encouragement. Thanks especially to Jani Sherrard, Kena Schuler, Charlotte Porter, Eldon Smith, Alyssa Karuna, David Maas, U.R. “Bob” Bowie, and Art Crummer – all group regulars who have significantly contributed to my growth as a writer.

  Shout out to Cool Beans Coffee Company in Columbia, South Carolina, and Starbucks Drive-thru’s at every exit up and down I-75 and I-95 because…coffee.

  To beta-readers Jani Sherrard, James Gantt, Kamilah Marshall, Loretta Armentrout, and Julie Williams Sanon, I am so grateful for your comments and your time.

  To advisors and mentors at Goddard College, Annie Abdalla, Michael Leong, Laurie Foos, Arisa White and Jocelyn Cullity, my second reader Michael Vizsolyi, and BFA Program Director Janet Sylvester: you have enriched my life in a multitude of ways, and I bless the day I found my way to Goddard’s doorstep. Thank you for your wisdom, encouragement, and high standards.

  Love to nieces and nephews, the steps and the grands - the in-laws and outlaws, the uncles and aunts. I love you all dearly and wish you the best, but I’m all out of room for naming the rest. You know who you are!

  To my husband, best friend, calm presence, and confidante Perry Selleck, you are the hardest-working man I know, and the kindest. I’ll love you forever!

  Last, but not least, I gotta thank my little Sugar. AKA Sh’boogie…Sugah-boogah…sha-poopy! How one little puppy can fill a void as big as my empty nest was, I’ll never know. But I’m awfully glad she found us.

  Author’s Foreword

  Like The Pecan Man before this, I tend to write stories set in places I know well and love. I was raised and lived for most of my life in Leesburg, a small town in Central Florida. Just before the new millennium, my husband and I fell in love with a little town called Mayo in the Big Bend area of Florida. We built a house on the Suwannee River and raised our youngest daughter there. It is a lovely town and we are blessed to call it home.

  There are places and settings in this new novel that many in our area will recognize. There is a building called the Chateau, which used to be the county courthouse, and has also been both apartments for rent and a bed and breakfast. Those, however, are the only details about the building that are real. Everything else about the building and its owners, past or present, are figments of my imagination. Likewise, the actual shops and restaurants along Main Street in Mayo are similar to those in the novel, but are not meant to be connected in any way to the story or to the fictitious characters I created.

  Through the writing of this novel, the name of the town has gone through many changes. First Silo because there are many in our area. Then Suwannee Junction and a few others I don’t remember now. Then Willow Springs, for the willow trees that mark the river entrance to Allen Mill, which is one of the spring tributaries that feeds the Suwannee and still bears the old beams that supported the mill that used to run there. I was going for a name that would be a nod to the Florida lifestyle, particularly this part of Florida, which has remained rural and natural and unspoiled throughout the building boom. The town name remained Willow Springs right up until we started focusing on the cover design and thus the name of the novel.

  Its working title had been “Beanie Bradsher,” but that was the series name. So, at some point, I landed on “What Matters in Willow Springs” as a title and finally felt good about it. But then, Patti and I decided we should have an alliteration in the title, mostly for marketing purposes. Of course Mayo would have worked, but I didn’t want to use the actual town name. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the town was called Maycomb, though locals recognized their hometown of Monroeville. I did the same in The Pecan Man, calling the town Mayville, but using similar landmarks from Leesburg. So, I pulled out a map and started looking for names that started with “M.” I found a little town in Mississippi called Mayhew Junction. It suited my little town and all its quirky characters. It was perfect.

  The character of Beanie Bradsher was inspired by a vague memory I have from childhood of a woman who wore colorful western clothes and rode a bicycle around town. I never knew her, but used the visual as inspiration to create a character I have come to love. About her name…Beanie comes from a nickname I call my beloved brother Bubba, who claims to go by Jim now, though I have never once called him that in my whole entire life. Bradsher is a family name on my mother’s side. She and I once found the headstones of some of the Bradsher family on a trip to North Carolina. In a way, this helps memorialize that trip for me, as it was one of my favorites. I lost my precious “Mommer” this year, and there are days when I think I will never get over it. She was the source for many colorful stories in my life, and her voice can be heard in many of the characters who inhabit the stories I tell.

  I’m taking the time to talk a little bit about this now, since some of the questions I’m asked most often at book clubs and readings involve how I come up with stories and characters. I have to admit that I’ve always been a people-watcher. And I’m drawn to those who are characters in real life. I don’t write as much as I daydream, however, so when I see someone interesting and don’t know anything about them, I just go on along and make stuff up. Always have. Must be why Mrs. Jean Miller, my beloved second-grade teacher at Skeen Elementary, called me a writer way back then. So glad I finally believed her.

  I hope you enjoy my little imaginings as much as I enjoyed writing them down.

  Contents

  Con
tents

  1 Beatrice Bradsher

  2 The Talk of the Town

  3 Sweet Lee Atwater

  4 The Château

  5 The Big Pig

  6 Straight to the Source

  7 In a Pickle

  8 Sound the Alarm

  9 Beanie Spills the Beans

  10 The Awakening

  11 Tallahassee or Bust

  12 All is Not Well

  13 The Risk You Take

  14 It’s Getting Thick All Right

  15 Driving and Dancing

  16 The End Justifies the Means

  17 Stubborn as a Mule

  18 Lost in Translation

  19 Family Meeting

  20 Decisions to Make

  21 Beanie Says Goodbye

  22 Moving In

  23 Something to Talk About

  24 What He Didn’t See

  25 Unsettled

  26 Now That’s More Like It

  27 New Arrival

  28 Beanie’s Secret

  29 The Welcoming Committee

  30 Trunk or Treat

  31 The Aftermath

  32 Don’t Mess with Mama

  33 Trouble is Brewing

  34 Time to Face the Music

  35 If Loving Him is Wrong

  36 The Lightbulb Goes On

  37 Lord Help

  38 The Lay of the Land

  39 Daddy’s Home

  40 Unexpected Visitor

  41 What’s Going On Here?

  42 Trust and Believe

  43 We’re Not Hiring

  44 Working on Mayhew Time

  45 Not Going Back

  46 The Final Countdown

  47 A Trip to Town

  48 Just Friends

  49 Home Sweet Home

  50 Goodnight, Will

  1

  Beatrice Bradsher

  Will Thaxton followed Beanie down the grassy aisles of polished granite headstones as she silently stopped at first one, then another. The morning was quiet, if you didn’t count the occasional logging truck roaring down the highway or the soft swish of Beatrice Bradsher’s crinoline petticoat.

  “This one’s kinda pretty,” Beanie said as she pointed to a low rectangular stone with two small, entwined hearts engraved at the top.

  “I think that one’s meant for two people, Bean,” Will said.

  “Oh, that’s why there’s two hearts,” Beanie sighed. “But there’s only one of me.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this now?” Will asked.

  “I done made up my mind on this one. It ain’t every day a body wins twenty-thousand dollars on the lotto. I aim to do something smart with it.”

  Will wanted to tell her to do something fun with it instead. He wanted to tell her to take a cruise to the Bahamas or buy herself a car or at least a new bicycle, but he didn’t waste his breath. She rode her red Schwinn bike everywhere she went. If she needed an occasional trip to Walmart in the neighboring county, she’d tag along with Will on Fridays, like she’d done today - except this time they stopped by the Suwannee Monument Company to pick out a headstone. Otherwise, everything she needed was within a two-mile radius of downtown Mayhew Junction. She did not need to drive a car even if she wanted to, which she did not.

  “Why don’t you put it in the bank and think about it a while? There’s no reason to be in a hurry about this, is there?”

  “I should hope not,” Beanie snorted. “But you never know about these things. I ‘bout got creamed by a chicken truck the other day. Them truckers are plain crazy, barreling through town like they ain’t got good sense. I don’t know why Sheriff Charlie don’t do somethin’ about it. Somebody’s bound to be killed, though Lord knows I hope it ain’t me. Leastways not anytime soon… What was we talkin’ about?”

  Will laughed. Beanie was a breath of fresh air. Honest to a fault, pure in the truest sense of the word, with very little reason to filter anything that came through her lips. She marched to her own beat, and that’s what he liked about her.

  Some people—LouWanda Crump, for one—would say Beanie was a spectacle, riding through town on a battered bike, a wire basket on the handlebars filled with groceries, fabric from the quilt shop, or a stack of Avon catalogs to deliver. Will suspected it wasn’t that she rode a bike, but how she dressed that gave everyone pause. Beanie Bradsher made her own clothes - skirts with layers of crinoline like the kind made for square dancing, button down shirts decorated with ruffles, hand-beaded trim, or Beanie’s personal favorite – rhinestones, and always, without fail, a matching cowboy hat covering the pale reddish hair that fell in curls down her back.

  Her face was pale, though her hands and legs sported a healthy tan. She wore enough makeup to compliment her lightly freckled features and army green eyes, but not so much as to outdo her daily attire. And, though no color palette went unexplored in her repertoire of outfits, her lips were always painted the same muted shade of red that Beanie was quick to identify to any potential customer as Avon’s Rose Gold #3.

  Cowboy boots completed her ensemble. There were two rows of them in her closet, as Will knew because she rented a room from him at The Château. He occasionally went in to make repairs, change the light bulbs, or deal with the temperamental old plumbing.

  “We were talking about how you should spend the money you won,” Will reminded her.

  “Well, I’ve already decided how to spend it. I’m gettin’ my affairs in order. Ain’t no one to do it when I’m gone, unless you count my cousin, and quite frankly, I don’t. There is no tellin’ what she would do if she took care of buryin’ me. Prolly just stick me in a pine box with one o’ them tacky roadside crosses for a marker and call it done. Or, Lord help me…” Beanie gasped and clutched the mother-of-pearl buttons at the base of her neck. “What do you call that when they put your ashes in one o’ them urinal things?”

  “Cremation?”

  “Yeah, cremation. Lord, the very word makes my butt draw up. I don’t wanna be burnt to a crisp and stuck in a urinal for eternity.”

  “Well, it’s not a urinal, Beanie; it’s an urn,” Will said, stifling the urge to laugh. “But I get your point.”

  “Whatever,” Beanie said. “I don’t wanna die without layin’ eyes on my gravestone. Better to buy it now and have a few years to enjoy it myself. Besides, I don’t think I’m ever going to see this much money at one time again.”

  “You talk like you’re on the cusp of infirmity, Bean. You’re forty-two and healthy as a horse. Why don’t you do something for yourself for a change?”

  “This is for me. Ain’t no one goin’ in there with me, as you just pointed out. So, this is all for me. Besides—my mind’s made up. Reckon they can do me a pair of boots up there like they done them hearts? I can get this smaller stone for my name, but see where that one heart comes up outta the top there? They could draw me a pair of boots and stick ‘em up there in the heart. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “Really nice, Beanie. I think it would be lovely and it would always remind me of you.”

  “Ha! Now there’s some positive thinkin’, Will Thaxton! You reckon you’re gonna be around when I’m gone? You got ten years on me if’n a day.”

  Had anyone else said that, Will might have been offended, but he knew Beanie meant no harm. She was only stating the obvious.

  “Point taken, Miss Bradsher. Except that it’s more like fifteen. And if you’re buying it today, I won’t have to wait until you’re gone, now will I? Let’s go talk to Mr. Henshaw and see if they can put a pair of boots in that heart, unless you would like me to put one of mine on your rear end for calling me old.”

  Beanie’s laugh rang out across the field of polished granite.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Will, really I didn’t…” Beanie protested, choking back giggles.

  Will feigned offense and led her by the arm toward the office at the back of the yard.

  “You’re not old, really. I mean, just ‘cause you’re a widower don’t mean y
our bones is getting’ brittle or anything.” Beanie laughed at her own joke, stumbling a bit as Will made a little show of tightening his grip on her elbow and pulling her along.

  “Better stop now before you have to find your own way back home,” Will said, grinning.

  “Wait, I gotta figure out what it’s gonna say,” Beanie said.

  “You can work that out with Mr. Henshaw later. He has to order the stone before he can sandblast the inscription on it, so you have plenty of time.”

  “Here’s hopin’,” Beanie chuckled. “Long as I steer clear of chicken trucks anyway.”

  2

  The Talk of the Town

  The Mayhew Café sits on the edge of town, across from the Dollarama store and right in front of Mandy’s Motel. On a good day, it’s a hot spot where you can pick up Mandy’s Wi-Fi for free. The café has been open seven days a week for the past thirty-odd years, closing only on Christmas Day and the day Ms. Doshia Cole passed, leaving the restaurant to be run by her capable daughter Edwina.

  The café is open early for breakfast and serves buffet style or from the menu until it closes after dinner. By 10:45, the trough is laden with fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, fresh cooked greens and cornbread. Depending on the day of the week, there might also be baked chicken, spaghetti, cornbread dressing or pork ribs smothered in barbecue sauce. And, for as long as Edwina remembers, there has always been a Friday night Fish Fry. Certain vegetables make their rounds at the buffet, but green beans are a staple, along with corn and fried okra.

  There is one large round table situated directly between the cashier’s stand and the buffet, and it is for locals only, though there is no sign of warning anywhere around. The first wave arrives at 5:30 a.m. and a host of good ol’ boys stream in and out through the breakfast hours. Anyone sitting within a few feet can learn a lot about Mayhew Junction—impending weather woes, the price of poultry feed, when to plant root crops, the political climate in town, and all the latest news and gossip.