By Invitation Only Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of my sweet brother,

  Theodore Anthony Benton

  Epigraph

  Remember, anyone can love you when the sun is shining.

  In the storms

  Is where you learn who truly cares for you.

  Unknown

  Contents

  Cover

  Endpaper

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Meet Diane English Stiftel

  Chapter 2: Meet Susan Kennedy Cambria

  Chapter 3: Diane’s Southern Soiree

  Chapter 4: Really? Pig Pickin’?

  Chapter 5: Irma Is Served

  Chapter 6: Moonshine and Make-Believe

  Chapter 7: Shelby Has a Word or Two

  Chapter 8: Party’s Over

  Chapter 9: Cocktails in Chicago

  Chapter 10: All About Beige

  Chapter 11: Lowcountry Thanksgiving

  Chapter 12: Chicago Thanksgiving—Shelby

  Chapter 13: Burying Pop

  Chapter 14: Susan’s Chicago Christmas

  Chapter 15: Lowcountry Christmas

  Chapter 16: Chicago Fire

  Chapter 17: Onions Make You Cry

  Chapter 18: Shelby Takes a Lowcountry Position

  Chapter 19: The Best Gift Ever

  Chapter 20: Diane—On the Way

  Chapter 21: Party On!

  Chapter 22: The Wedding—Susan

  Chapter 23: Jailbird Blues—Susan

  Chapter 24: You Never Know—Diane

  Chapter 25: No Forgiveness

  Chapter 26: Diane Is Awesome

  Chapter 27: Susan’s Reflection

  Chapter 28: Diane on the Farm

  Chapter 29: OMG!

  Chapter 30: Road Trip

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Dorothea Benton Frank

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Meet Diane English Stiftel

  “I can give a party if I feel like it. Who says it’s not the correct etiquette? What if I don’t want to go to Chicago? He’s my only grandson.”

  —Virnell Bruce English

  august 2016

  mount pleasant, south carolina

  My mother stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing the ancient cast-iron pot as though it was encrusted with the residue of mortal sins, sins somehow fused into the metal. In fact, it was coated with scorched beef stew, tonight’s dinner gone forgotten. She looked out the window and sighed so hard, I would’ve sworn it was her frustration with herself and not the late-afternoon breeze that moved the Spanish moss in the trees all across the yard. Eighty was creeping up on her, snatching bits of her memory and stamina, and it infuriated her. No woman really wanted to be eighty and still working full-time unless she was ninety and still working full-time. As for me, well, I was too old for leggings. Let’s leave it at that.

  The window over the kitchen sink was propped up by a wooden spoon, held in a slightly lopsided position. As the heat of the day had broken, every window in the old house was raised, held open with a book or a Coke bottle or another household object. When the cool air of the afternoon wafted in, the house itself sighed in relief, or so it seemed. In any case, opening the windows was a ritual we performed at the same time every day all summer long, year after year. You’d think someone would go to the hardware store and buy those little swinging hooks used for this very purpose, but no. Just like you’d think someone would’ve checked the stew before it burned.

  Still, even with all the open windows, you could have cut the humidity and the silence with a knife.

  “It was just beef stew,” I said. “We have hamburgers in the freezer. I’m happy with a burger.”

  “You know I hate waste,” she said.

  “So do I. But what’s really the matter? Something else is bugging you,” I said, not particularly eager for the answer.

  After a long silence she said, “That diamond is a bad-luck stone.”

  “There’s no such thing,” I said. “Diamonds are diamonds.”

  “My own flesh and blood doesn’t have the brains to know when to be superstitious,” she said. “Law! Where did I go wrong?”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  The diamond in question was given to me by my ex-husband when we became engaged over thirty years ago. It had been his mother’s. That woman. Agatha was truly the most awful woman I have ever known, and I thanked the good Lord every day for erasing her from my life. Still, my sweet mother honestly believed that poor single carat was tainted with the DNA of my ex-mother-in-law’s black heart. In the Lowcountry we believed such things, or at least considered them. Maybe it was cursed. Anyway, Agatha sure enough ruined my marriage with all her meddling and second-guessing, that much was certain. But she didn’t ruin my life; I was made of stronger stuff than she could ever imagine. I tied a bow around Duggan’s big fat head and sent him right back up the highway, home to her apron strings in Raleigh, North Carolina. Due to his family’s lack of interest, I raised our son, Fred, here on the farm in my parent’s house. It wasn’t the worst thing for him or for me. I never heard a word from Duggan again. Or his mother. When Fred went to college at Clemson, so did I. He became a CPA and I earned a degree in agribusiness. Fred’s now a young man, ready to propose marriage to the love of his life, Shelby Cambria. He would seal the deal with that diamond. His family’s heirloom. What’s my future daughter-in-law like? Let’s just say I had more reservations about her than I did about the diamond.

  Shelby was a city girl, as poised and polished as one might imagine an urban young woman could be. She was sophisticated. But I feared she was too exacting, which made me nervous. She had to go for a run every day or she said she couldn’t function. Really? She used only soy milk in her decaf latte. Ick. She saw the dentist four times a year. Seemed excessive unless she had a situation with her gums or something. She never cursed, at least not in front of me. Okay, but truly? She never had a credit card balance. Admirable, sort of. She used a fountain pen only when writing thank-you notes. Prissy. Sorry, but it is. Her car had never run out of gas. Anal. To my mind these were the characteristics of a perfectionist, which could lead to becoming small-minded and judgmental, unforgiving, and ultimately a cold wife. But I was keeping my mouth shut and zipped. As long as she loved my boy, I loved her. If she broke his heart, I’d kill her with my bare hands. This seemed reasonable to me.

  But still, I worried. The combination of her polish and my suspicions about what was beneath it made it difficult for me to see her blending well with my family. I just couldn’t see it. Here’s why.

  Let’s just start with my younger brother, Floyd. He lived in his rusted-out trailer and had a tire garden past the barns on our farm. He kept dubious company and odd opinions about the federal government, global warming, and the real possibility of alien abductions. Never mind his wardrobe choices (camo), his very old pickup truck, and the pack of howling dogs that followed him wherever he went through the years. Thankfully, now he was down to just one, Moses. He brought three girls into the world with two wives. His daughters never came to visit and had expressed no interest in living here. At least he believed in love. His current live-in fling was called Betty Jean, BJ for short, an unfortunate nickname given the parlance of the day. She was a grammar school teacher, bless her heart. At least she was age appropriate, forty-five to his fifty.

  We were a family of, well . . . I guess the nicest way to describe us might be to call us a little eccentric and nonconformist. When you didn’t live in a strict corporate world, you didn’t have to worry about fitting in and being politically correct all
the time. You could afford the luxuries of self-expression. We took advantage of self-expression in spades.

  I don’t know how Fred came out of this environment like he did, but he did. I had mysteriously given birth to a wholesome Midwesterner. Shelby and Fred were as buttoned up as two young people could be. They met in college and now worked for the same large accounting firm in Chicago, where they lived. My greatest fear was that after they were married she would keep him away from us, from me. Every woman with a son worries about that. And although she was very polite, behind her personal restraint I knew she thought we were a tribe of hillbillies. We weren’t hillbillies.

  So there we were, doing the lunch dishes in my mother Virnell’s kitchen. We didn’t have air conditioning, and it was a mighty paltry bit of air the afternoon was meting out. Pop was the reason we didn’t have central air. He thought almost every invention of the twentieth century was unhealthy. He was probably right.

  To be completely honest, most of our farmhouse stood in the shade of sprawling live oak trees that had to be hundreds of years old, so generally the temperature wasn’t completely intolerable. And most of the rooms now had ceiling fans, a concession my father made four years ago after my mother fainted dead on the floor while six huge steaming pots boiled away on the stove as she sealed Ball jars filled with her famous peach jam. But these were the dog days of August, thusly named for a dang good reason. There were moments so miserable you’d have been happier in a hole under the front porch with the dogs. On days like this a freshly dug hole was no doubt the coolest spot in the entire Lowcountry of South Carolina.

  Mother washed; I dried. I watched as perspiration trickled down the back of her neck. I didn’t like it. It didn’t seem right that a woman of her age should have to sweat from work. And it bothered me that my parents would never be able to retire and travel and maybe own a condo overlooking the ocean somewhere. But then, neither would I. That’s what farm ownership was – never-ending work. We didn’t have so many acres that we had to hire huge crews to harvest, but we produced enough to keep three generations of us alive at the same time. There was considerable pride to be had in surviving by your own grit.

  It wasn’t a glamorous life – up at dawn every morning. By the end of the day, I can tell you, we were almost always bone tired. I’m really not complaining, because the outside world held little interest for me and there was a deep satisfaction that came with knowing our produce, especially our peaches, was highly anticipated each year. I had everything I wanted. Well, almost. I’ll admit that there were days when I wished for a reprieve – maybe a trip somewhere I’ve never been. I had my dreams, to be sure, but now it was time for my son’s dreams. Mine could wait.

  I glanced at my mother’s hands, gnarled with the ravages of arthritis and spotted with age. How much longer would she even be able to do the work she did? And ever since Pop’s last heart attack, all he seemed to be able to do was sit on the front porch or in his La-Z-Boy recliner down at the farm stand and whittle the day away. He made whistles and toys that we sold there. Figurines of deer and turtles and coyotes. Little soldiers. Children loved them. And him. Sometimes he’d tell children stories about the Catawba and Sewee Indians that held them rapt while their mothers filled their bags with corn or butter beans. My parents were dearly loved by all our customers. But their mortality was becoming a concern. What was going to happen to the farm and to me? There was no next generation.

  My brother, Floyd, with his succession of women, would be happy to make his contribution and then to sing “Polly Wolly Doodle” all the day. Ah, Floyd. Well, he was a pretty great brother, but I didn’t think he had the wherewithal to take over the family enterprise. Not all on his own. It was too much for one person. He tried hard to pick up the slack for Pop.

  I slipped an armload of dried plates into the dishwasher. The dishwasher was a surprise gift to Momma from Floyd three years ago when he won some money with the lottery. It stood alone like a piece of sculpture and untried, as my mother didn’t trust it either. She still sterilized the jars we used to put up jam in the same huge pots of boiling water that sealed the jars when they were filled. So we used the dishwasher as a cupboard, a good solution for the scant storage we had.

  “All those darn things do is waste water, run up your electric bill, and fade out the pretty flowers on my plates. Who needs that?”

  If Virnell was anything, she was old-fashioned and practical to a fault. But it was her feistiness that held Pop’s heart. She tickled him to death.

  Our kitchen was the pulsating epicenter of the sagging, sway-in-the-wind, 160-year-old farmhouse where I grew up with Floyd. The pale blue appliances and knotty pine cabinets were so old that they had come back into style. Needless to say, the bathroom fixtures were dated curiosities. Family mythology says that even in its youth, the house was so unappealing that Sherman’s troops let it stand. The officers said it wasn’t worth the flick of the flint it would’ve taken to torch it, and the Yankees had slept in the barn by choice. I heard somewhere that the real reason they took to the barn was that my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was especially frisky, but I’d never repeat that. I’d always hoped that my mother’s version of the story was the true one – that her great-grandmother of six generations long gone had charmed General Sherman’s men with peach delicacies and declined their offers of romance. While wearing a hoop skirt, corset, and lacy pantaloons? Doubtful. Our family tree didn’t grow femmes fatales. We grew peaches. Acres upon delicious, fragrant acres of them, as far as the eye could see. And smaller amounts of strawberries, plums, figs, watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes, string beans, butter beans, asparagus, pecans, and corn. And no doubt, her great-grandfather of that day had drained his supply of peach brandy to keep the rascals at bay.

  “Did you say something?” I said.

  “Daydreaming again? I said, how is our Fred planning on proposing?”

  “Oh, he’s got a very elaborate scheme cooked up. As soon as the ring is finished . . .”

  Mother dried her hands on her apron and turned around to face me, putting her hands on her hips. “What do you mean, finished? It didn’t fit, or what?”

  Virnell was easily provoked in the heat.

  “Just what I said, finished. You know, she wanted something more modern, so they had a jeweler mount it in a halo of little bitty diamonds . . .”

  “A what?”

  “A halo. You know, like a little circle. It probably makes the diamond look bigger.”

  Mother looked up at the ceiling, then down again, and cocked her head to one side, squinting her eyes. “So, one carat isn’t big enough for her? And she already knows what her engagement ring looks like? Good gravy.”

  “I guess so. Anyway, as soon as he has the ring, he’s going to take her down to the shore of Lake Michigan. He’s hired two musicians from the Chicago Symphony to suddenly appear and play some Vivaldi or something. A friend of his is setting up a champagne bucket with glasses and all that, and another friend is going to film it with a drone.”

  “A drone.” Mother’s jaw dropped. She shook her head in disbelief. “What next? A daggum parade with a marching band and the Goodyear Blimp?”

  “Oh, come on, Mother! I know it’s a bit over the top, but I think it’s very sweet! I didn’t even know Fred had this kind of poetry and romance in him!” I refolded my dish towel and took a stack of bowls to the cabinet.

  “Romance is for fools,” she said. “Grown men popping up out of nowhere with violins? Public consumption of alcohol? He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get arrested.”

  “Probably. But if he manages to stay out of jail, it’s incumbent on us to give them an engagement party.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s the bride’s family responsibility. This is not how we do things in this family!”

  “Well, Mom, a lot has changed since I married Duggan. These days, when the bride is from far away, both sides might throw a little something to honor the happy couple.”

 
“So now we have to give a party for the family and friends of Miss Fancy Pants?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “On second thought, you’re right. Why shouldn’t we celebrate with our family and friends right here? Maybe they won’t want to go to Chicago.”

  “My point exactly!”

  “Besides, Fred is the only grandchild you gave me. Let’s throw him a party no one will ever forget!”

  Chapter 2

  Meet Susan Kennedy Cambria

  “Who in the world uses boxed, handwritten invitations for an occasion like this? How will I explain this to my friends?”

  —Susan Kennedy Cambria

  chicago, illinois

  “Oh, dear,” I said to Shelby as I read the invitation. “It appears your father and I will be making a trip to South Carolina for an engagement party.”

  “You sort of have to, Mom,” Shelby said. “You’re the MOB. I gave Frederick the list of people to invite. It wouldn’t look good if you and Dad didn’t come.”

  “You did what?”

  “Well, I had to. It was a question of timing.”

  I could feel my blood pressure rising. Did my daughter, my only child, think she was going to take control of her wedding, without me?

  “Well, do you think I might trouble you for a copy of that list?” What was she thinking? “Is this party by invitation only, or is just anyone allowed to come?”

  “Mom, I didn’t invite the entire world. And there’s still time for you to ask whoever you want. I’ve got twenty-five extra invitations at my apartment because I knew you’d flip out.”

  “I am not flipping out. And we are planning to have our own party for you and Frederick.”

  “Okay, whatever. You know I love you, Mom. I’ve got to go. I’m meeting Frederick at Tiffany’s to pick out china and silver and do the registry thing, which he thinks is stupid, but of course I insisted. I don’t want to wind up with stuff I hate or forty salad bowls.”