Secrets over Sweet Tea Read online

  He laughed. “I know.” He finally leaned back, patted her rear, and came around next to her. “Who are you spying on now?”

  “New neighbor. Four doors down.” She motioned with her fingers in the direction of the house as if she were engaged in some covert mission.

  He played along. He always played along. “Well, that does happen when people move out. Usually someone moves in. Think they’re terrorists?”

  She slapped at him without turning his way. “I think they’re from up North somewhere. They drive one of those Prius cars.” Sylvia Malone could be the neighborhood watch committee all by herself, but Scarlett Jo couldn’t resist helping her out now and then.

  “They do sell those now in the South, you know.”

  “I know that. But I watched them take in most of their clothes too.” Her sigh came out heavy. Did this man not pay attention?

  “Of course you did. And you started this surveillance activity when?”

  “Two days ago. They started Saturday. And had everything in by yesterday.” Her next words came out in a whisper. “Their clothes were mostly black. Only people from New York or California dress in all black.” She took a long sip of her tea.

  “We’d better hide the good china.” He shivered as he spoke. “Plus, all this time I thought you were out there praying in the mornings.”

  “Don’t mock me, Jackson Newberry. Northerners are a different breed, baby. They don’t like you to touch them. They don’t want to be called sugar or sweetie or honey pie or darlin’. They’ve never heard of lard. They have no clue on God’s green earth what fixin’ to even means. And if you say y’all, they look at you like you probably marry your second cousin or something.”

  His phone rang from his pocket. He leaned over and kissed her before he pulled it out. “I’ve always wondered about your cousin Thelma Lou.”

  She swatted at him, and he laughed. “What I know about you, Scarlett Jo, is you can make even Northerners fall in love with you. I’ll see you tonight. And please, don’t take them anything at least for a week. Let them get settled first. Visit them next weekend.”

  She started to protest, but he shook his ringing phone in front of her and walked from the room. She sighed. People thought pastors were like God—needed to be accessible at all times. She turned back toward the house down the street that seemed quiet after yesterday’s busy activity. She breathed a prayer for the hearts that would now live inside. Then her mind began to rummage through the selection of baked goods at Merridee’s. She’d find out what these Northerner newcomers were really like. And she had every intention of finding that out today.

  He kissed her softly and rolled over. “That was just what I needed this morning.”

  Her words brushed softly against his ear. “Me too.” She pulled the sheet around her and snuggled up under his arm.

  “I’ve got to go,” he murmured. “It’s time to really get this day started.”

  “No, not yet. This has been the perfect morning.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I know, babe. But I’ve got to get some kind of run in before I head to the office.” He moved his mouth closer to her face. “But we will pick up where we left off later. How’s that?”

  Her lip poked out in a soft pout.

  He walked into the bathroom and grabbed his running shorts and T-shirt, which were haphazardly thrown over the side of the tub. After he slipped his running shoes on, he returned to the bedroom.

  She looked beautiful lying there, her dark-brown hair scattered in waves across the pillow, the filtered sun lighting her flushed cheeks. He went to the side of the bed and leaned down and kissed her. Her lips were warm and soft and inviting. Her arms came up around the base of his neck, and he chuckled through the kiss.

  “Seriously, I’ve got to go. If I don’t go now, I won’t have time to exercise today.”

  “I hope you have a great day then.” Her words dripped with confidence, a certainty that he would never leave. He shook his head to dislodge his emerging thoughts. If he didn’t get outside right now and run, he wasn’t going to leave this house all day.

  “You too, babe.”

  He left the bedroom and headed through the kitchen to the door that led out to the small garden. He turned the knob and entered the warm May Tennessee morning. As he came to the edge of the fence, he looked quickly to see if any cars were on the streets. All was still quiet, so he jogged across and settled into a pace that was certain to produce a sweat fast.

  The streets of downtown Franklin formed a grid of sorts. Main Street ran down the middle, crossed at regular intervals by numbered avenues. First Avenue, on the northeast end of town near the Harpeth River, bent around to form Bridge Street, parallel and north of Main. Third Avenue met Main at the town square, with its stately Confederate monument. And the entire downtown district came together southwest of the square, where Fifth Avenue met Main and a diagonal street called Columbia Avenue to create Five Points. This star-shaped junction could take you any direction you wanted to go—Murfreesboro, Nashville, Bellevue, Thompson Station, or Brentwood. But it also invited you to stay because all of town life intersected at Five Points. A post office anchored one corner; a church sat on another. Then there was a Starbucks and an ice cream parlor, and the Williamson County Archives building finished it off.

  This one little section of town could fulfill just about every need a person had—spiritual, emotional, physical, and relational. And yet Zach Craig had never felt so unfulfilled in his life. A bead of sweat dropped into his eye as he reached Main Street and turned east. Already the lift from his morning tryst—that alive feeling—was draining away. His run wasn’t helping much either. He couldn’t outrun the truth of what his life had become.

  He and Caroline had been married for fifteen years now. The twins were almost fourteen, and the estrogen in his household was off the charts. The girls cried over almost everything, and when they weren’t crying, they were simply nasty. He didn’t know where his sweet little girls had gone. And Caroline wasn’t much better. With her, you never knew what you were going to get. Each morning you could throw a feather up in the air, and where the wind would take it was usually more dependable than Caroline’s moods.

  A sneeze that tickled his nose almost forced him to stop running. Spring had arrived with a vengeance, and the allergies that had tortured him since he moved to Tennessee now bloomed to life with the flowers and the grasses. His other faithful companion, shame, was about to settle over him with a vengeance as well. So he shifted his thoughts quickly to the cases that lay before him that day. He let them play through his mind as he continued down Main and skirted the square.

  He had been predominantly a divorce attorney for the last five years—more out of necessity than choice. Title closings had been his real expertise, but when the real estate market tanked, he’d had to find something that was steady. And divorce certainly seemed a dependable source of income, especially in the Nashville area. He had actually read in a magazine that the city had been given the grade of D in marriage survival. Almost the worst grade you could get. Bad news—unless you made your living off those who flunked out.

  He saw all sides of divorce—the ugly, the uglier, and the ugliest. One of his current clients was convinced his estranged spouse had just killed his dog. The man had come into his office sobbing, certain the dog had been poisoned. The vet was doing a necropsy now. That was a new one for sure. It never ceased to amaze him how minuscule the line was between love and hate.

  Zach’s legs burned as his feet pressed harder into the unforgiving concrete of the sidewalk. He ran down First Avenue and rounded the corner onto Church Street. A large moving truck sat on the opposite side of the road. More new neighbors, it looked like.

  Franklin had become an attractive place to live for people from both coasts. Nissan’s decision to relocate its entire California operations to middle Tennessee a few years ago had helped the lagging economy, but not by much. Finances were tight for a lot of peopl
e these days. Even divorce attorneys.

  Zach ran past the first few townhomes that sat at the corner of the neighborhood—his neighborhood now. The brownstones at First and Church looked historic, but the entire community was actually less than a decade old, built to blend in with the quaint downtown. He stopped at a fenced courtyard and opened the gate. A large iron fountain flowed just as it had when he’d left it earlier that morning. The brick walkway and four park benches that circled the fountain pretty much made up his front yard.

  Caroline had fallen in love with this “urban development” from the moment construction began back in 2005. The houses were at peak market value then, way past Zach’s budget. But Caroline was determined to own one. He resisted for two years, though it cost him a few trinkets in between. Then the market dropped a little and he relented. But he’d bought too high nevertheless, and he was still trying to figure out how to pay for his wife’s dream house.

  He paced the courtyard for a few minutes with his hands on his hips, sweat dripping from his brow as he tried to slow his breathing. He raised one hand and rubbed at his face, the weekend growth rough against his palm. He walked toward the front steps and leaned against the wrought-iron rail. It was already warm beneath his touch. There were days when he wondered if Tennessee even knew how to cool off.

  He turned the handle on the wood-and-etched-glass door and reentered his three-story world. He found the twins perched at the kitchen counter eating cereal.

  “Morning, Lacy.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  She swatted at him. “Gross, Dad. You stink.”

  Joy held up her hand before he even got near her. “Don’t even think about it, Dad.”

  He laughed. “Good morning to you too. Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s on the phone, I think,” Lacy answered.

  “Want me to fix you some French toast?”

  Joy dug a spoon into her cereal for one last bite and then hopped off the barstool. “We’ve got to go get ready.”

  Lacy followed quickly. “Yep. See you, Dad.”

  “Hey, I love you.”

  “You too, Dad!” Joy hollered. He was almost certain that Lacy grunted as she headed for the stairs.

  He grabbed a water bottle from the refrigerator and headed upstairs. He could hear Caroline going at it with someone over the phone. The peacefulness of his morning was obviously over.

  “Well, you didn’t fix it.” She stood in the middle of the bathroom floor and scolded as if talking to a six-year-old. “It still isn’t working. So I want someone over here today, and I don’t want some four-hour time slot that you think you might be able to honor. I want to know exactly when you will be here. I am just as busy as you are, and if this isn’t fixed by the end of the week, I’m calling the Better Business Bureau.”

  Zach leaned against the counter. When he left his wife sleeping early this morning, she had looked so peaceful and serene that he almost changed his mind about going out. No more. Her brow was furrowed, which was hard to believe possible now that she had started getting Botox. She was still two years from forty, and yet she’d thought she needed it. He hadn’t argued. Not because he agreed, but because he was simply tired of arguing.

  “I’ll see you in one hour then.” Caroline hung up the phone. She looked at him and brushed at her bangs, which had fallen in front of her face. “You sure got out of here early this morning.”

  He walked over to her and moved long strands of auburn hair from the shoulders of her workout shirt. “Yeah, I knew if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get a run in.”

  She squirmed away from him. “You stink, Zach.”

  He moved back. “I’ve been told that already.”

  “Well, I’ve got a busy day today. I’m going to drop off the girls and then come back to meet the electrician. Then once he gets through, I’m heading to the store. I’ve got two clients coming in to be styled for photo shoots, so I won’t get to the new inventory until tonight. I probably won’t be home until pretty late.”

  He went to the shower and turned on the water. “Why can’t Kristin help you today?”

  She turned toward him, frustration in her green eyes. He knew he was forgetting something, but he just couldn’t bring it to mind.

  “Summer internship in Paris, remember? I’ve only got Kelly and Amy available, and they need to work while I’m doing the styling.”

  “By the way, why do our girls have school today?”

  She shook her head in that way she had, as if he’d just spoken in a foreign tongue. “What?”

  “Well, I have this, um, friend who took his kids to visit their grandmother. They didn’t have school today. Why do ours?”

  She gave herself one last glance in the mirror. “It’s probably a private school, public school thing. Even their spring breaks are different.”

  That made sense. “So the girls and I are on our own for dinner?”

  She nodded. “You can take them out or something. They love that.”

  “Yes, they do,” he mumbled as she left. “They enjoy their mother’s presence too.” She never heard that part.

  Zach climbed into the shower and let the water wash over him, allowing his mind to retreat back to this morning: the shining dark hair, the deep, dark eyes, the desire, the longing, the actual awareness of his presence.

  He decided he might take a run again tomorrow morning. Yep, he was pretty sure he’d run all week long.

  Grace Shepherd slid the earpiece from her ear and pushed away from the desk in front of her, the wheels of her chair rolling back smoothly as she did. She stood and picked up the final pages of her pink notes from the desk.

  Leo Tanner, her producer, burst out of the control booth, licking his fingers. Everything about him was accentuated by speed and volume. “Great job today, Grace. Great job.”

  She stepped over the cord to camera number one and dropped her notes into the trash can on top of an empty Krispy Kreme doughnut box. When she moved from the bright television lights into the shadow of the studio, her body seemed to cool instantly.

  “Thanks, Leo.” She patted him on his thick football-player’s shoulder. He had been a linebacker at the University of South Carolina and still loved to go around shouting, “Go, ’cocks!”—especially now that he was a Gamecock in Tennessee territory. The man had given his life to sports and to broadcasting. Worked as a sportscaster in Columbia, South Carolina, for quite a few years, then moved to the Nashville market and worked here until his gut got too big for the camera. That was when the gold Producer placard took its place on his office door. Producing was a perfect job for him because he loved to tell people what to do.

  He followed her out of the studio. “I told you to take the week off, Grace. It would have been okay.”

  “Leo, if I took a week off every time we moved, I would run out of vacation time. And listen, you should lay off the Krispy Kremes. Honestly, you know what the doctor has said about your diabetes.”

  He tucked in a corner of his blue button-down that hung beneath his navy blazer, the bottom three buttons of the shirt stretching across his girth. “You brought ’em. Though they’re nowhere near as good as your homemade cinnamon rolls, so I’ll be glad when this move is over and you can get yourself back in the kitchen. And don’t you worry about my diabetes. That’s why they have medicine. As for the vacation thing—you know you never take one, so you’re not about to run out of time. And you have to be exhausted.”

  “I am.” She sighed and reached for the door of the ladies’ restroom. “I’ll take a nap this afternoon.”

  “Think that husband of yours will let you live in this house for a while?”

  She patted Leo’s dark-brown cheek, smooth beneath her hand. “Thank you for your concern, but you know we do this for investment purposes.”

  “Gotcha one of those foreclosures, huh?”

  She smiled. She couldn’t help it. “We got a really good deal. Now I need to go so I can get home and unpack boxes.”

  He took
the door handle, opening the door for her. “You’re just as stubborn as me, Grace. Must be why I keep you.”

  She laughed. “I’m sure that’s it. What are you doing today?”

  “You mean aside from making the other networks weep by producing an amazing morning news show? Well, I’m going to a Rotary club lunch, and Sissy starts soccer this afternoon. Papa’s got a full day. Now, go sleep so you can get up in the middle of the night tonight and do it all over again.”

  “Technically it will be tomorrow morning.”

  “Grace, if it’s dark, it’s night. We work at night. Don’t fool yourself.”

  She smiled. “Okay, well, I’ll see you tonight.” The restroom door closed slowly behind her as she walked past the three bathroom stalls and into the small dressing room at the back. She pulled the second door closed behind her and turned to study herself in the mirror. She straightened the red jacket that Tyler had picked up for her on his last New York trip. He’d said the color would be good on the air, striking against her shoulder-length blonde hair and light-brown eyes.

  He also said the new house was a good deal, that buying it was the right thing to do. For them. For now. She reminded herself of that as if saying so would convince her.

  She pulled gently at the skin around her eyes. They did look tired. And just thinking about the boxes that awaited her made her even more tired. But this was part of the job. Both jobs—news anchor and wife. She began collecting tubes and brushes from the vanity, tucking them away in her cosmetics bag. She had been packing up makeup for the last ten years, ever since they upgraded her from reporter to anchor. The job had come the same year as her wedding. At the time, she’d been sure she needed nothing else. She had officially been granted the perfect world—a wonderful job and a good-looking, talented husband.

  A soft burst of air that was half laugh, half pain came out of her nose. Like most fairy tales this side of Walt Disney World, that one had evaporated, leaving her with one less glass slipper and no sign of Prince Charming.