Ain't She Sweet? Read online

  As he stood at the window watching the lights go on in the carriage house, the line of his already stern mouth grew even harder. So…The rumors were true. Sugar Beth Carey had returned.

  Fifteen years had passed since he’d last seen her. He’d been little more than a boy then. Twenty-two, full of himself, an exotic foreign bird who’d landed in a small Southern town to write his first novel and—ah, yes—teach school in his spare time. There was something satisfying about letting a grudge ferment for so long. Like a great French wine, it grew in complexity, developing subtleties and nuances that a speedier resolution wouldn’t have allowed.

  The corner of his mouth lifted in anticipation. Fifteen years ago he’d been powerless against her. Now he wasn’t.

  He’d arrived in Parrish from England to teach at the local high school, although he’d had no passion for the profession and even less talent for it. But Parrish, like other small Mississippi towns, had desperately needed teachers. With a view toward exposing their youth to a larger world, a committee of the state’s leading citizens had contacted universities in the U.K., offering jobs complete with work visas to exceptional graduates.

  Colin, who’d long been fascinated with the writers of the American South, had jumped at the chance. What better place to write his own great novel than in the fertile literary landscape of Mississippi, home of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright? He’d dashed off an eloquent essay that vastly exaggerated his interest in teaching, gathered up glowing references from several of his professors, and attached the first twenty pages of the novel he’d barely started, figuring—rightly so, as it turned out—that a state with such an impressive literary heritage would favor a writer. A month later he’d received word that he’d been accepted, and not long after that, he was on his way to Mississippi.

  He’d fallen in love with the bloody place the first day—its hospitality and traditions, its small-town charm. Not so, however, with his teaching position, which had gone from being difficult to becoming impossible, thanks to Sugar Beth Carey.

  Colin had no specific plan in place for his revenge. No Machiavellian scheme he’d spent a decade mulling over—he would never have given her that much power over him. Which didn’t mean he intended to set aside his long-held grudge. Instead, he’d bide his time and see where his writer’s imagination would take him.

  The telephone rang, and he left the window to pick it up, answering in the clipped British accent that his years in the American South hadn’t softened. “Byrne here.”

  “Colin, it’s Winnie. I tried to get you earlier today.”

  He’d been working on the third chapter of his new book. “Sorry, love. I haven’t gotten around to checking my voice mail. Anything important?” He carried the phone back to the window and gazed out. Another light had gone on in the carriage house, this time on the second floor.

  “We’re all together for potluck. The guys are watching Daytona highlights right now, and no one’s seen you in forever. Why don’t you come over? We miss you, Mr. Byrne.”

  Winnie enjoyed teasing him with reminders of their early relationship as teacher and student. She and her husband were his closest friends in Parrish, and for a moment he was tempted. But the Seawillows and their significant others would be with her. Generally the women amused him, but tonight he wasn’t in the mood for their chatter. “I need to work a bit longer. Invite me next time, will you?”

  “Of course.”

  He gazed across the lawn, wishing he weren’t the one who had to break the news. “Winnie…The lights are on in the carriage house.”

  Several beats of silence stretched between them before she replied in a voice that was soft, almost toneless. “She’s back.”

  “It seems that way.”

  Winnie wasn’t an insecure teenager any longer, and an edge of steel undercut her soft Southern vowels. “Well, then. Let the games begin.”

  Winnie returned to her kitchen in time to see Leeann Perkins flip her cell phone closed, her eyes dancing with excitement. “Y’all aren’t going to believe this.”

  Winnie suspected she’d believe it.

  The four other women in the kitchen stopped what they were doing. Leeann’s voice had a tendency to squeak when she was excited, making her sound like a Southern Minnie Mouse. “That was Renee. Remember how she’s related to Larry Carter, who’s been working at the Quik Mart since he got out of rehab? You’ll never guess who stepped up to the register a couple of hours ago.”

  As Leeann paused for dramatic effect, Winnie picked up a knife and forced herself to concentrate on cutting Heidi Pettibone’s Coca-Cola cake. Her hand barely trembled.

  Leeann shoved her cell in her purse without taking her eyes off them. “Sugar Beth’s back!”

  The slotted spoon Merylinn Jasper had been rinsing off dropped in the sink. “I don’t believe it.”

  “We knew she was coming back.” Heidi’s forehead puckered in indignation. “But, still, how could she have the nerve?”

  “Sugar Beth always had plenty of nerve,” Leeann reminded them.

  “This is going to cause all kinds of trouble.” Amy Graham fingered the gold cross at her neck. In high school, she’d been the biggest Christian in the senior class and president of the Bible Club. She still had a tendency to proselytize, but she was so decent the rest of them overlooked it. Now she set her hand on Winnie’s arm. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Leeann was immediately contrite. “I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m being insensitive again, aren’t I?”

  “Always,” Amy said. “But we love you anyway.”

  “And so does Jesus,” Merylinn interjected, before Amy could get around to it.

  Heidi tugged on one of the tiny silver teddy bear earrings she was wearing with her red and blue teddy bear sweater. She collected bears, and sometimes she got a little carried away. “How long do you think she’ll stay?”

  Leeann slipped her hand inside her dipping neckline to tug at her bra strap. Of all the Seawillows, she had the best breasts, and she liked to show them off. “Not for long, I’ll bet. God, we were such little bitches.”

  Silence fell over the kitchen. Amy broke it by saying what all of them were thinking. “Winnie wasn’t.”

  Because Winnie hadn’t been one of them. She alone hadn’t been a Seawillow. Ironic, since she was now their leader.

  Sugar Beth had come up with the idea for the Seawillows when she was eleven. She’d chosen the name from a dream she’d had, although none of them could remember what it was about. The Seawillows would be a private club, she’d announced, the funnest club ever, for the most popular girls in school, all chosen by her, of course. For the most part, she’d done a good job, and more than twenty years later, the Seawillows were still the funnest club in town.

  At its peak, there’d been twelve members, but some had moved away, and Dreama Shephard had died. Now, only the four women standing with Winnie in the kitchen were left. They’d become her dearest friends.

  Heidi’s husband, Phil, poked his head in the kitchen. He handed over the empty Crock-Pot that held the Rotel dip the men insisted on having at every gathering, a spicy tomato and Velveeta concoction for dunking their Tostitos. “Clint’s making us watch golf. When are we eating?”

  “Soon. And you’ll never guess what we just heard.” Heidi’s teddy bear earrings bobbled. “Sugar Beth’s back.”

  “No kidding. When?”

  “This afternoon. Leeann just got the news.”

  Phil stared at them for a moment, then shook his head and disappeared to pass the word to the other men.

  The women set to work, and for a few minutes silence reigned as each fell victim to her own thoughts. Winnie’s were bitter. When they were growing up, Sugar Beth Carey had possessed everything Winnie wanted: beauty, popularity, self-confidence, and Ryan Galantine. Winnie, on the other hand, had only one thing Sugar Beth wanted. Still, it was a big thing, and in the end, it had been
all that mattered.

  Amy pulled a ham from one oven, along with a dish of her mother’s famous Drambuie yams. From the other oven, Leeann removed garlic cheese grits and a spinach-artichoke casserole. Winnie’s roomy kitchen, with its warm cherry cabinets and vast center island, made her house the most convenient place to gather for their potlucks. Tonight they’d parked the kids with Amy’s niece. Winnie had asked her own daughter to baby-sit, but she’d turned difficult lately and refused.

  As born and bred Southerners, the Seawillows dressed up for one another, which meant they spent the first part of every get-together discussing what they were wearing. This was the heritage passed on to them by mothers who’d donned nylons and high heels to walk to the mailbox. But Winnie wasn’t a Seawillow, and despite her mother’s nagging, it had taken her longer than the rest to figure out how to pull herself together.

  Leeann licked a dab of cheese grits from her index finger. “I wonder if Colin knows.”

  “Did you get hold of him, Winnie?” Amy asked. “We got so distracted by the news, nobody asked.”

  Winnie nodded. “Yes, but he’s working.”

  “He’s always working.” Merylinn reached for a paper towel. “You’d think he was a Yankee.”

  “Remember how scared we used to be of him in high school,” Leeann said.

  “Except for Sugar Beth,” Amy pointed out. “And Winnie, of course, because she was teacher’s pet.” They grinned at her.

  “God, I wanted him,” Heidi said. “He might have been weird, but he sure was hot. Not as hot as he is now, though.”

  This was a familiar topic. Five years had passed since Colin had come back to Parrish, and they’d only just gotten used to having a man who’d once been the teacher they most feared as part of their adult peer group.

  “We all wanted him. Except for Winnie.”

  “I wanted him a little,” Winnie said, to redeem herself. But it wasn’t really true. She might have sighed over Colin’s brooding romantic aloofness, but she’d never really fantasized about him like the other girls. For her, it had always been Ryan. Ryan Galantine, the boy who’d loved Sugar Beth Carey with all his heart.

  “What did I do with the oven mitts?”

  Winnie handed them over. “Colin knows she’s back. He saw lights at the carriage house.”

  “I wonder what he’ll do?”

  Amy stuck a serving fork on the ham platter. “Well, I for one don’t intend to speak to her.”

  “If you get the chance, you know you will,” Leeann retorted. “We all will because we’re dying of curiosity. I wonder how she looks.”

  Blond and perfect, Winnie thought. She fought the urge to run to the mirror so she could remind herself that she was no longer lumpy, awkward Winnie Davis. Although her cheeks would never lose their roundness, and she couldn’t do anything about the small stature she’d inherited from her father, she was slim and toned by five grueling sessions a week at Workouts. Like the other women’s, her makeup was skillfully applied and her jewelry tasteful, although more expensive than theirs. Her dark hair shone in a short, fashionable bob, the work of the best stylist in Memphis. Tonight she wore a beaded T, a pair of periwinkle pants, and matching slides. Everything she owned was fashionable, so different from her high school days when she’d plodded down the hallway in baggy clothes, terrified someone would speak to her.

  Colin, who’d been such a misfit himself, had understood. He’d been kind to her from the beginning, kinder than he’d been to her classmates, who were frequently the target of his sharp, cynical tongue. Still, the girls had daydreamed about him. Heidi, with her passion for historical romances, was the one who’d come up with his nickname.

  “He reminds me of this tortured young English duke who wears a big black cape that snaps in the wind, and every time there’s a thunderstorm, he paces the ramparts of his castle because he’s still mourning the death of his beautiful young bride.”

  Colin had become the Duke, although not to his face. He wasn’t the kind of teacher who inspired that sort of familiarity.

  The men began to wander in, drawn by the smell of food and a desire to hear their wives’ reactions to the news of Sugar Beth’s return.

  Merylinn flapped her arms at them. “Y’all are in the way.”

  The men ignored her, just as they always did when it was time to eat, and the women began their familiar dance around them, carrying the food from the kitchen to the late-eighteenth-century sideboard that occupied one wall of Winnie’s graceful formal dining room.

  “Does Colin know Sugar Beth’s back?” Merylinn’s husband, Deke, asked.

  “He’s the one who told Winnie.” Merylinn shoved a salad bowl in his hands.

  “And you sweet thangs complain because nothing ever happens in Parrish.” Amy’s husband, Clint, had grown up in Meridian, but he knew the old stories so well they sometimes forgot he wasn’t one of them.

  Brad Simmons, who sold home appliances, chuckled. He was Leeann’s date for the evening. Leeann didn’t really like him, but since her divorce, she’d been working her way through every eligible bachelor in Parrish, along with a few who weren’t eligible, but none of them talked about that because Leeann had it hard. With two kids, one of them handicapped, and an ex-husband who was always behind on child support, she deserved whatever diversion she could find.

  Winnie’s husband was the last to appear. He was the tallest of the men, lean and fine featured, with wheat-colored hair, caramel eyes, and one of those perfectly symmetrical male faces that had, on several occasions, prompted Merylinn to tell him he needed to fulfill his God-given mission and sign up to be a regular sperm donor. The Seawillows were too polite to stop what they were doing and cross-examine him the way they wanted to, but they watched from the corners of their eyes as he picked up the corkscrew and began to open the wine Winnie had set out.

  Winnie felt the old ache in her chest. They’d been married a little over thirteen years. They had a beautiful child, a lovely house, a life that was almost perfect. Almost…because no matter how hard Winnie tried, she would always be second best in Ryan Galantine’s heart.

  After two days living on Coke and stale Krispy Kremes, Sugar Beth couldn’t put off buying groceries any longer. She waited until dinnertime Tuesday evening, hoping the Big Star would have emptied out by then, and drove into town. Luck was with her, and she was able to pick up what she needed without having to speak with anyone except Peg Drucker at the register, who got so rattled she double-scanned the grape jelly, and Cubby Bowmar, who caught up with her while Peg was bagging and revealed a gaping hole where his right canine tooth had once been.

  “Hey, Sugar Beth, you are even mo’ gorgeous than I remember, doll baby.” His eyes trailed from her breasts to the crotch of her low-rise pegged pants. “I got my own business now. Bowmar’s Carpet Clean. Doin’ real good, too. What’s say me and you go toss back a few beers at Dudley’s and catch up on old times?”

  “Sorry, Cubby, but I swore off gorgeous men the day I decided to become a nun.”

  “Dang, Sugar Beth, you ain’t even Catholic.”

  “Now that sure is gonna surprise my good friend the pope.”

  “You ain’t Catholic, Sugar Beth. You’re just bein’ stuck up like always.”

  “You’re still a smart ‘un, Cubby. Tell your mama hi for me.”

  As she walked out of the Big Star, she refused to look at the poster that had stopped her dead on the way in:

  The Winnie & Ryan Galantine Concert Series

  Sunday, March 7, 2:00 P.M.

  Second Baptist Church

  Donation of $5.00 benefits local charities

  The night felt as if it were closing in on her, so she headed toward the lake, only to realize she couldn’t afford the gas. She made a U-turn on Spring Road, not far from the entrance to the Carey Window Factory, the business her grandfather had founded, except it was called CWF now. She found it hard to imagine Winnie and Ryan hosting a concert series. They’d been married for more
than a dozen years now. The thought shouldn’t be painful, since Sugar Beth was the one who’d dumped him. With her typical bad judgment, she’d taken one look at Darren Tharp and forgotten all about Luv U 4-Ever. Now, Winnie was the driving force behind the town’s revitalization, and she sat on the boards of most of its civic organizations.

  Cubby Bowmar’s carpet cleaning van passed her going the other direction. In high school, Cubby and his cronies used to show up on the front lawn at Frenchman’s Bride in the middle of the night, howling at the moon and calling out her name.

  “Sugar…Sugar…Sugar…”

  Her father generally slept through it, but Diddie climbed out of bed and sat by Sugar Beth’s window, smoking her Tareytons and watching them. “You’re going to be a woman for the ages, Sugar Baby,” she’d whisper. “A woman for the ages.”

  “Sugar…Sugar…Sugar…”

  The woman for the ages turned her battered Volvo into Mockingbird Lane and glanced at the French Colonial that had once been the home of the town’s most successful dentist but now belonged to Ryan and Winnie. The past two days couldn’t have been more dismal. Sugar Beth had cleaned up the carriage house so it was habitable, but she hadn’t uncovered a trace of the Lincoln Ash painting, and tomorrow she faced the unpleasant task of searching that wreck of a depot for it. Why couldn’t Tallulah have bequeathed her blue chip stocks instead of a shabby carriage house and a train stop that should have been torn down years ago?

  She came to the end of Mockingbird Lane, then braked as the Volvo’s headlights picked out something that hadn’t been there when she’d left—a heavy chain stretching across her bumpy gravel driveway. She’d barely been gone two hours. Someone had worked fast.

  She got out of the car to investigate. The quick-set cement had done its job, and a couple of hard kicks didn’t budge either of the posts holding the chain. Apparently the new owners of Frenchman’s Bride didn’t understand her driveway wasn’t part of their property.

  Her spirits sank lower, and she tried to convince herself to wait until morning to confront them, but she’d learned the hard way not to postpone trouble, so she headed for the long walk that led to the entrance of the house where she’d grown up. Even blindfolded, she would have recognized the familiar pattern of the bricks beneath her feet, the point where the walk dipped, the spot where it curved to avoid the roots of an oak that had come down in a storm when she’d been sixteen. She approached the front veranda with its four graceful columns. If she ran her finger around the base of the closest one, she’d come to the place where she’d gouged her initials with the key to Diddie’s El Dorado.