“Talk about baggage,” Flynn said.
“Compared to them, we’ve got very little,” Nessa said.
“Way I figure it is that we have to come back to the root of our problems, and that’s the only way to get rid of them,” April whispered. “Your fathers don’t want to get rid of theirs, so they’re letting them fester and ruin any hope of a relationship between them.”
“Amen to that.” Flynn bit into the first biscuit and remembered his mother making him biscuits just like these to bring along on their trip to Blossom. Tears welled up in his eyes, but he was a grown man, and according to his father, men did not cry.
“To hell with it.” He let the tears loose and didn’t even flinch when they dripped from his jaw onto his shirt, leaving wet spots.
He held his free hand to his cheek, remembering the first time he’d busted a knuckle in the oil field, when he had shed tears. His father had rocked his jaw when he slapped him with an open palm and said, “Men don’t bawl like babies, and women hate weakness.”
April laid a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right? Talk to us.”
“No, I’m not,” Flynn answered. “Mama made this same kind of biscuits for me on the last morning that we came to Blossom. She hugged me and said she’d see me in two weeks. The next time I saw her, she was in her casket, and Nanny Lucy turned me over to my dad. Nothing was ever the same in my life again.”
“That’s a tough memory,” Nessa volunteered.
“It may sound horrible”—April picked up a rock and skipped it over the surface of the creek water—“but I’m glad that if I had to lose my mama, that I was too young to remember it. Nanny Lucy used to say that hard work would help me get through anything. Let’s go do our quilting, and then, if it doesn’t rain, I’ll help you paint the house today.”
“I have to go get the paint first,” Flynn said, “but I’ll take all the help I can get.”
“Count me in, too,” Nessa said.
“Thanks”—Flynn wiped his wet cheeks on his shirtsleeve—“for coming out here to see about me.”
“Hey, we’re family. We might all three be screwed up, but we’re still family, and we’re going to work through all this rotten baggage together,” Nessa told him.
April nudged his shoulder from the other side. “Remember that part of the Miranda Lambert song about the house that built her? It says that she thought that maybe she could find herself.”
Flynn and Nessa both nodded.
“That’s our story,” April said. “Now we’ve just got to figure out a way to get away from the past and look at the future. It won’t be easy, but like Nessa said, we’re family.”
“Thank goodness for that.” Flynn finally grinned. “If we weren’t, there’s no way I’d put up with you two.”
“If we weren’t, we would have sent you off with your new stepmom,” Nessa teased.
“And we’re not ever going to act like Uncle Matthew and Uncle Isaac,” April said. “Give me your promise right now.”
“You got it,” Flynn said.
“I promise,” Nessa agreed.
“Good. Y’all are my rock and anchor. Let’s keep it that way. And speaking of stepmoms,” she said, changing the subject, “the black widow looked like she could have you for breakfast when you came wandering into the kitchen this morning.”
Flynn shook his head slowly. “I’ve sworn off women, especially ones that would be attracted to my dad. Either they’re crazy when they meet him or they will be by the time he’s done with them.”
“Don’t know which is worse, your dad or mine,” Nessa said.
“It would be a toss-up.” Flynn finished off his breakfast and poured a mug of coffee from the thermos. “Thanks again for this and for the support.”
Chapter Eight
April woke with a start, sweat pouring off her body. She threw off the covers and immediately shivered when the cold air from the window air-conditioning unit cooled the sweat on her body. Lightning flashed through the window. For a split second she could see everything in the living room; then suddenly it was absolutely dark again.
“One, two, three.” She covered her ears and counted like she had when she was a child. When she got to ten, thunder rolled off in the distance. That meant the storm was ten miles away and could possibly make a turn and not even come near Blossom.
Wake up, April! her grandmother’s voice screamed inside her head. We’ve got to go to the cellar. God is punishing me for my sins.
April tried to shake the storm voice, as she had called it when she was a child, from her head. She never knew why God was punishing her grandmother, or how she could have possibly sinned when she was in church every time the doors opened, but in the recurring nightmares, Nanny Lucy kept repeating the same thing over and over.
“You were so religious that there’s no way you sinned,” April whispered just as another flash lit up the room. In that instant she didn’t know if she was really awake or if she was still dreaming, because she could swear that Nanny Lucy was sitting in her rocking chair at the end of the sofa.
“One, two, three.” She counted again and could tell that the thunder was getting closer.
“Screw this,” she said as she pushed back the sheet and got out of the sofa bed. She tiptoed across the room and discovered that no one was sitting in the old rocking chair and what she had seen was a quilt that had been haphazardly thrown over the back. She grabbed it, wrapped it around her body like an oversize shawl, and then went into the garage. She pulled back an old rug, raised the trapdoor into the cellar, and went down the steps.
The old familiar smell of mustiness met her when she reached the bottom. She groped around in the dark for the string that would turn on the light. In the process, the wooden thread spool attached to the bottom of the string slapped her right between the eyes. She felt her way over to the cot in the corner, sat down, and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
The rain sounded like golf balls hitting the metal roof. When a tiny flash of light came through the window in the garage and down into the open cellar door, thunder followed behind it immediately. The storm must be moving fast to have gone from ten miles out there to right on top of them in only a few minutes.
She stood up and waited for the next bolt of lightning to tell her where that abominable spool was and finally located it. She gave it a tug, and a low-watt bulb lit up the cellar enough so that she could see the oil lamp over in the corner. Nanny Lucy’s rule was that they were only to use the electricity to find what they needed; then they had to turn it off.
April lit the lamp’s wick and adjusted it to the right level. Nanny Lucy fussed if there was black soot on the chimney when it was time to leave the cellar. She crossed the narrow room to where the shelves were built in to hold jars and jars of canned fruits, jams, and vegetables. These days they were sparse, which meant that Nanny Lucy hadn’t done much preserving in her final years, but there were still more than a dozen jars of peaches crammed up in one corner. And back behind them, lying on its side, was an almost full bottle of Jack Daniel’s bourbon.