“I had no idea.” April followed her out of the shed. “I figured that since you had parents, both of you were so much better off than I was.”
“I thought that since you got to live with Nanny Lucy, you were so much better off than me or Flynn.” Nessa closed the door behind her. She had brought her own baggage to Blossom with her, but somehow her problems seemed minor compared to what she could see in her two cousins. “What about you, Flynn?”
“I’m not ready to talk about the past, but I would rather have lived here, no matter how tough it was, than live with my dad,” Flynn said.
Strange that they all had different views of their grandmother. To April she had been a reluctant parent. To Flynn she’d been a wonderful grandmother whom he would have chosen to live with over his father. To Nessa she’d been an escape from an ultra-religious household for a couple of weeks every summer.
Flynn finally broke the silence when they reached the porch. “Let’s all load up and go to Paris to stock the place with food. I’ll drive. We can start on the quilt tomorrow.”
“First we make a list.” Nessa was good at making lists and organizing everything from her desk drawer to her time. “It won’t take but a few minutes. Flynn, you can make one, too, of everything you need for rewiring. April and I can go to the grocery store, and you can go to the hardware store.”
Flynn glanced over at April. “Guess you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the bossy out of the teacher.”
“If I’m going to get the name, be damned if I won’t have the game.” Nessa tilted her chin up a notch. She didn’t want to ever be a submissive woman like her mother. “We will take my SUV since it looks like it could rain, and we’d have to put the groceries in the back of your truck. You can both put up with my bossy, or else don’t bother unpacking.”
“The preacher’s daughter cusses,” April teased.
“The preacher’s daughter has also had men that stayed the night with her and has been drunk off her butt a few times and is still bossy,” Nessa said. “With an overbearing father, I had to learn to stand up for myself or else I would have been married for more than a decade and had a houseful of kids by now.” She stopped at the door and turned around. “April, you can help me make our grocery list. Since you don’t like to cook and wouldn’t know cinnamon from paprika, I’ll do the checking and tell you what to write down.”
“Yes, ma’am.” April snapped to attention and sharply saluted her cousin. “Thank you, ma’am, for allowing me to follow your orders.”
“And now the smart-ass that I remember comes out.” Flynn chuckled. “Where have you been hiding it?”
April dropped her hand, and the expression on her face changed from sassy to blank in a fraction of a second. “Under lots of stuff that should be forgotten. For now we’ve got things to take care of this afternoon so that we can get out here in the morning and start quilting. The shed gets pretty hot in the afternoons, so we should work when it’s at least semi-cool, in the mornings.”
Nessa could relate to what April said. So many painful memories should be forgotten, but according to some of the things she had overheard the school counselor saying, talking about them was the best way to overcome your problems.
“What if we put a window unit out there?” Flynn stopped by his truck and took a couple of suitcases from the back seat.
April did the same thing, only her things were in two white garbage bags.
Nessa went back out to her SUV, hit the button to raise the hatch, and picked up two suitcases from a stack of boxes.
“Good God!” Flynn stared at the packed SUV. “Did you bring everything you own?”
“I don’t know about Nessa, but I sure did,” April said. “This is it, lock, stock, and barrel. A car that runs off fumes and bald tires, what clothing I own, and I think there’s a bottle of water left somewhere in the back seat.”
“I came with intentions of staying at least until the end of summer,” Nessa said, “so I cleaned out my fridge and my pantry. If I stay past the end of August, I’ll have to make a trip back out to the Panhandle and get the rest of my stuff.”
She rolled the suitcases across the gravel driveway and hoisted them up the steps to the porch. Then she took them, one by one, to the bedroom that she and April had shared when she came to visit. The room looked the same—trundle bed on one wall, dresser on the other, small closet, window with lace curtains overlooking the backyard.
Nanny Lucy had told her that when her boys, Isaac and Matthew, were growing up, there had been bunk beds in the bedroom. Her daughter, Rachel, hadn’t come along until the boys were fourteen and fifteen, and her husband had already passed, so she had kept the new baby in her room until she was two years old and then moved her crib into the living room. It wasn’t until the boys had left home, at eighteen and nineteen, that Rachel had gotten her own bedroom.
Nessa pulled back the curtains, slid the window up, and propped it open with a wooden stick, probably the same one that had been used back when her father was a small boy. The fresh air blowing through the screen brought in the scent of roses with just a touch of mint mingled with it. She inhaled deeply and made a mental note to water the flower beds, and then she went back out to bring in the boxes of stuff that would go in the kitchen and pantry.
“How long will it take you to make your list?” Flynn kept arranging his tools in an old leather belt when she came through the living room.
“Maybe fifteen minutes.” Nessa looked up at the ceiling. “You do realize that it’s going to be a hot job rewiring this place.”
“I’ll sweat in a hot attic any old day rather than having to crawl under the house,” Flynn answered. “I’ve worked in extreme heat, and I don’t mind it, but I’m just a little claustrophobic.”
“Did your daddy ever put you in a closet when you disobeyed him?” Nessa remembered spending some time in the pantry with the door closed when she was a child. She was supposed to be asking God for forgiveness for whatever sin she had committed, but instead she’d usually spent the time eating cookies, or even just brown sugar.
“Of course not,” Flynn answered. “My dad was too busy to care what I might or might not do wrong. As long as I did my chores, he pretty much left me alone.”
“Did you have to crawl under houses?” Nessa pushed the issue.
“Few times, but mostly they were trailer houses, and that’s enough interrogation for today. Arrest me or I’m leaving.” He grinned.
“When you two get done arguing, I’ve got a question,” April said.
Nessa and Flynn both turned around to look at her.
“Is it all right if I put Nanny Lucy’s things in the coat closet in bags or boxes and store them in the garage?” April nodded toward a closet door to the left of the television. “I need a place for my things.”
“Sure,” Nessa told her. “Do what you need to do, and you can use half the dresser drawers in your old room if you want to or need them.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I can make do with the shelf in the closet. I’ll take care of that job when we get back from Paris.” April held up a pen and a piece of paper. “Are you ready to make that list?”