“I’ll bring them out.” Jackson smiled and headed to the kitchen. “Take a seat anywhere you like. I’ll drag the hope chest out into the middle of the floor to open it so you can all see what’s inside. Once we’re done, I can scoot it back in the corner again.” He brought a six-pack of cold beers out and set them on the scarred coffee table.
April had taken the rocking chair, and Flynn sat on one end of the sofa. Since there were only two places left, and they were both on the sofa, that meant Nessa and Jackson would be side by side until someone opened the hope chest. She chose the other end so that at least she wouldn’t be between the two guys.
Jackson twisted the cap off a bottle and handed it to Nessa, and then did the same for Flynn and April. When he sat down in the middle of the sofa, his whole right side was pressed against Nessa. She was surprised that the sparks didn’t light up the whole room.
“Does anyone want to guess what might be in the chest?” he asked.
Nessa took a long drink of her beer, but it didn’t touch the fire raging in her hormones. Right then she didn’t care if there was a million dollars for each of them, or if the hope chest turned out to be empty. She just wanted to talk to Jackson alone and figure out where she stood with him. She was through being mad and was ready to get things settled.
April was the first one to speak up. “I think there’s keepsakes in there that were valuable to her but not worth much. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a bomb went off when the lock is turned. She was so disappointed in us that she might be ready to end the O’Riley line right here and now.”
Nessa’s blood ran cold. Poor Nanny Lucy had had so many disappointments in her life, beginning with Grandpa, that she just might have put his head in the hope chest, too.
Flynn turned up his beer, took a long drink, and then set it on the coffee table. “Let’s just get it over with. Anyone want to send up a prayer or make a confession just in case April is right?”
“There’s not a bomb in there,” Jackson chuckled. “She might blow y’all into eternity, but she wouldn’t harm a hair on my head. She liked me.”
“You willing to bet on that?” Nessa asked.
“Yep, I am.” Jackson turned and gazed into her eyes a second time.
“If you’re that confident, then drag it out here,” April told him. “But let’s make a pact right now between us three. If there’s something in there that will tear apart the friendship we’ve built, then let’s burn it tonight and pretend it was never there.”
“I agree,” Flynn said.
Nessa took one more swallow of her beer and set it beside Flynn’s bottle. “Me too.”
Jackson pulled the chest away from the wall and removed the key that was taped to the back. He didn’t make a big fanfare but simply slipped the key into the lock and turned it. “Does one of you want to have the honor of lifting the lid?”
April shook her head.
Flynn just stared at the thing.
Nessa got to her feet, took a couple of steps, and eased the lid up. It bumped onto the floor. “There now. It’s done, and it did not blow up in our faces.”
“What’s in it?” Flynn asked.
Nessa bent down and picked up an envelope from the bottom of the hope chest. “Just this. Looks like a letter. Either of you want to read it, or should I?”
“You do it,” April said. “If she had a favorite among the three of us, it was you.”
Nessa sat down on the floor and tore open the envelope, fully expecting to find some legal paper, but it was a handwritten letter from her grandmother. She recognized the perfect penmanship from the birthday cards she had received from Nanny Lucy through the years. “It’s a letter,” she whispered. “Are you sure you want me to read it out loud?”
“Maybe you’d rather do that with just you three . . . ,” Jackson said.
Nessa held up a palm in protest. Jackson was a part of this whether the two of them got things straightened out or not, and her heart told her that he should stay for the reading. “She trusted you to keep this thing, which is more than she trusted one of us, so you can hear what she has to say. Here goes.”
To my grandchildren,
If you have opened the hope chest, I’m dead and the quilt that I left for you is finished. Knowing Nessa and her neatness, I’m pretty sure she cleaned out the hall closet, and you’ve found my diary in the suitcase by now. I’ve been in the ground for a while, so I don’t care if you kids know about the O’Riley dirty laundry. Do with it what you will, but I do hope you are more honest with your children than I have been with you. It must have come as a shock to hear that your grandfather was a womanizer, that I had an affair with my best friend’s husband, and that Rachel didn’t belong to your grandfather. But you know all that by now, so there’s no need rehashing it in this letter.
Nessa laid the first page in her lap. “What if we hadn’t found her diary and all those papers?” Even after just one page, she felt even more numb than she had at Nanny Lucy’s funeral.
“Then you can bet your sweet soul we would be rushing over to the house to find it,” April said.
“We have all had our share of secrets,” Flynn said, “and no one is perfect.”
Nessa began to read the second page:
I thought about leaving all my money to you kids, but then that didn’t seem fair to my boys. Matthew would go through the inheritance like he does his women. Isaac might do something good with it, but I’ve been mad at him for a long time now. He tried to make Nessa marry a man of his choosing. When she didn’t bow to his wishes, he cut her off, and that didn’t set well with me. That went against the Christian values I thought he had. He might be a preacher, but he’s got a controlling streak like his father had, and I don’t want to give him a single dime.
When the doctors told me that the ugly mass in my head could explode at any time, I stayed up all night, trying to figure out what to do with my money and my things. I had a million dollars in the bank, plus what I had in my checking account. The quilting business has been very good to me. Finally, I made the decision about the house and land. You know that, of course. Then right after Thanksgiving I donated my money to a research lab that is studying bipolar disorder. Maybe my mood swings are what made your grandfather start cheating on me, or maybe his cheating happened and then my system went out of balance. At this point it doesn’t really matter.
I hope you weren’t expecting to find money in the hope chest. I want you to make your own way and find your own happiness. Don’t depend on someone else like I did to make you happy. Be content and complete within yourselves. Then, when and if one of you finds someone to love, you can give them your whole heart. I gave you each a little seed money and a place to live. If you decide to live in Blossom, you’ve got that much. If not, then you’ve got a vacation place. I do hope that you spend some time there each summer and rekindle that closeness that you kids had back when you were young.
That said, I’ll move on to the quilt. I hope you recognized the fabric I used in the quilt top and remembered the good times you all had in the summer when you got to be together for a couple of weeks. I tried to make those times happy for all of you.