Prologue
Mims Turner sucked at poker.
She hadn’t always but it seemed like she hadn’t won in months. She was always betting on the wrong hand or folding when she should call. Just once, she’d like to win. And if Mims could win only once, she’d like it to be today.
“I’ll see your five.” Mims tossed a stack of five pennies in the pot, followed by a second set. “And raise you five.”
“Ditto,” Clarice shouted, having predictably left her hearing aids at home. Her pennies bounced into the center of Mims’s card table.
“Now we’re all in.” Bitsy’s words rang with finish-line finality. She thought she was going to win. Again.
Just this once…
Mims ground her teeth. She was an outdoorswoman. She was president of the Sunshine Valley Widows Club, a group of thirty women who raised money for causes that benefited the small town of Sunshine, Colorado. She considered herself unflappable. She should be able to master a game of cards. It was just that lately, Mims’s entire life was off. She couldn’t always make the point she wanted to, and sometimes she lost track of what she was saying midsentence. It was like going through menopause all over again!
She glanced at her opponents. Clarice was a free spirit. She considered bras too establishment. But she knew how to work the hand she was dealt. And Bitsy? Bitsy looked like her ancestors had come over on the Mayflower and settled in Boston. And yet she played cards as if she’d grown up in Vegas.
The trio made up the board of the Widows Club. Privately, Mims, Clarice, and Bitsy liked to call themselves the Sunshine Valley Matchmakers Club. With every Widows Club fund-raiser, they gave Cupid a little help, a nudge to someone they felt was ready and worthy of love. Whoever won this hand would win the pot of pennies and the right to choose whom the group nudged next.
Mims’s cards stuck to her slightly damp palms. Two red kings, two red aces, a two of hearts. All that red had to mean something. It had to mean Mims could break her losing streak!
“I like Edith Archer,” Mims blurted, unable to hide her agenda any longer.
“You haven’t won.” Clarice’s loud voice reverberated in Mims’s cozy parlor.
Bitsy’s black velvet hair bow trembled above her bobbed blond hair. “Edith is old.”
“We’re all old.” If seventy was old, Mims was ancient. “Edith is widowed, which means she gets priority.” That was a rule.
“You can’t touch Edith.” Clarice harrumphed. “She’s been widowed less than three months.” That was another rule. They didn’t begin matching widows or accepting them into the general membership until they’d been bereaved at least half a year. Although the club offered a shoulder to cry on, they were primarily an organization dedicated to good works.
“I like Lola.” There was something in Bitsy’s normally gentle tone that wasn’t so gentle. “Lola’s a widow. And she’s not even thirty.”
“Bitsy’s got a point,” Clarice said, still using her outdoor voice.
Normally Mims would agree that a younger widow needed more help getting back on her feet, but instead she said, “You should have seen Edith at church last Sunday.” Her short gray hair had looked as if she’d stuck her finger in a light socket. “When Charlie died, she fell apart.” And kept falling.
Not that Mims hadn’t been coming apart at the seams too. Charlie had been Mims’s first love. He may have chosen Edith more than half a century ago, but when Mims had become a widow, Charlie had become her emotional rock, unbeknownst to Edith. When Charlie had died, it had been like losing Mims’s husband all over again.
Mims resented having to share Charlie with Edith, even in death. She’d do anything to keep her rival out of the Widows Club. This was her last chance. “Edith needs a man, or she’ll do something she’ll regret.”
“Mims has a point too.” Clarice considered her hand.
“She’ll have to back it up by winning.” Bitsy showed her cards. “Two pair.” Two black kings and two black aces—yin to Mims’s yang.
Impossible. Mims couldn’t breathe. She spread her cards on the table with cold fingers.
“Well, I’ll be,” Clarice murmured. She glanced at her cards and then laid them facedown. “It’s a tie.”
Bitsy looked like she’d missed one of her grandchildren’s birthdays. “We’ve never had a tie before.”
“We need a rule to cover ties,” Mims said. Such as In case of a tie, the person who’s won the least is the winner.
Before Mims proposed her rule, Clarice came up with one of her own.
“This is a sign.” A slow grin worked its way across Clarice’s thin, leathery face. “I propose we match both Edith and Lola.”
She didn’t need to ask Mims twice. “I second.”
They both turned to Bitsy, who was staring at her cards as if she were a puzzled fortune-teller.
“Just one question,” Bitsy said finally, her gaze landing squarely on Mims. “Is either one of them ready for love?”
Chapter One
If Lola Williams had known Randy would be unable to honor his wedding vows…
If Lola had known Randy would toss aside her love like he did his dirty laundry…
If Lola had known Randy was untrustworthy, unfaithful, and untrue…
She would’ve returned to New York City before his wedding ring left a tan mark on her finger. But after one year of marriage and one year of widowhood, New York was out of reach, lost to her, a log at the bottom of a fast-burning fire.
Because of Randy.
Because of Randy, Lola was no longer doing hair and makeup for celebrities on Broadway. She was doing hair and makeup for the elderly at the Sunshine Valley Retirement Home and for the dead at the Eternal Rest Mortuary.
She might have salvaged her career on Broadway if she hadn’t believed theirs was the forever kind of union. But she was a dreamer. After Randy’s fatal car crash, she’d decided their love needed a grand gesture of mourning—a year’s worth—tying up the loose ends of his life bit by bit, until the only thing left to do was go through his clothes and his side of the closet on the anniversary of his death. Only then had she learned her husband had been sleeping around.
Sitting in her driveway, Lola tossed another pair of Randy’s tighty-whities on the bonfire.
She should move her folding chair back from the small blaze before it singed her eyebrows more completely than the afternoon’s revelation had made ashes of her heart. Those ashes clogged her lungs, deadened her limbs, and numbed her brain until she couldn’t do anything besides bend slightly, reach for another pair of undies, and toss them on the fire.
Cars passed by. And slowed.
Drivers stared. And scowled.
Across the street, Mrs. Everly’s mauve curtains twitched.
The familiar burn of being an outsider—Worse! That gal from New York City—made Lola wish she’d used Randy’s fifty-year-old bottle of whiskey to light the fire instead of nail polish remover. A swig of spirits might have given her the courage to do more than send answering glowers at passersby.
Couldn’t they see she was devastated? Couldn’t they see she’d hit rock bottom?