“Nope. I don’t care what’s under the dirt and roots to the mesquite trees. But I don’t want anyone else to ever come in there and tell me they’re putting an oil well in my backyard, either.”
“Smart woman. I’ll get on that right now. Call me if you think of anything else,” he said.
“Thank you.” Jennie Sue touched the screen and slid the phone back into her purse. It hadn’t even reached the bottom when it rang.
“You can’t do this.” Frank’s voice cracked. “Your lawyer sent over papers for us to sign, and oh my Lord, Jennie Sue. This is too much. We can’t take your money like this.”
“You can and you will. You’ve given your whole lives to the family, and now it’s your turn to do whatever you want with the rest of yours. I love both of you so much, and this makes me happy.” Jennie Sue’s eyes welled up with tears. “Please, Frank, don’t make me all sad again. I’ve had enough of that.”
“‘Thank you’ isn’t enough,” Frank said.
“That goes both ways. I can’t ever thank y’all enough for all you’ve done for me since the day I was born. Now start plannin’ your bucket list, and then do whatever is on it,” she told him.
“I couldn’t ever tell you no.”
“Then don’t start now. Let me talk to Mabel.”
“She says that she’s crying too hard to talk to you now, but she’ll call later.”
“Tell her that I love her,” Jennie Sue said. “See you later.” Saying that brought her dad to mind and put still another lump in her throat.
“Yes, you will.”
“So have you talked to Rick?” Lettie asked when she got into the front seat of Jennie Sue’s car that evening to go to the Sweetwater Monument location.
“Not yet, but I’m going to tonight after we get this job done. We need to get things settled,” she answered.
“You are right. Rick has wallowed around in this mood long enough. My opinion is that you should get up every morning and decide if you are going to be happy or miserable. Me, I choose to be happy most of the time. Evidently someone is going to have to kick Rick in the seat of the pants to get him over this attitude,” Lettie said.
“When Lettie chooses to be miserable, I stay the hell out of her way,” Nadine said from the back seat.
“Sometimes everything is like either a dream or a nightmare.” Jennie Sue turned south toward Sweetwater. “I still have to tell the Belles that I’m not joining their club. I imagine Daddy smiling and Mama throwing things when I think about it.”
“Sounds to me like you are keeping one foot in reality,” Nadine said.
There was little traffic on the road from Bloom to Sweetwater that evening, so it didn’t take long for them to arrive at the monument place. Jennie Sue got out and went straight toward a small heart-shaped white stone sitting on the lawn for display. “I want this for my baby.”
“Then you should have it,” a lady said as she came out of the small building. “I’m Rachel Carter. You must be Jennie Sue Baker. You mentioned the possibility of three when we talked. Do you have an idea about the other two?”
Jennie Sue took her phone from her purse and showed the lady the pictures that she’d taken. “As near like these as possible.”
“I’ve got a whole book full of adornments. You can have a rose or a book or even a deer or a bull on them if you want,” she suggested.
“Just plain. Names, dates, and that’s all. But I want my daughter’s name on the front of the heart one, and on the back it should be engraved with ‘Daughter of Jennie Sue Baker.’ Can you do that?”
“I sure can. Let’s go inside and we’ll fill out the forms. I’ll have them all ready in two weeks,” she said. “I’ll call before we deliver so you can have someone come and show us exactly where to set them.”
“That would be Randall from down at city hall. He takes care of the cemetery,” Nadine said.
“We’ll be in touch, then. Anything else you need today?” Rachel asked.
“No, that should do it.” Jennie Sue pulled out a debit card that she’d never used before. When she’d signed the papers to be included on her folks’ accounts in case of their deaths, the bank had given it to her. Seemed fitting that the first time it was used was to pay for their headstones.
She made it to the car before she broke down. She wrapped her arms over the top of the steering wheel, laid her face on them, and sobbed. “I’m going to miss them both so bad. They weren’t perfect and they drove me crazy, but I loved them.”
Nadine patted one shoulder from the back seat, and Lettie clamped a hand on the other one. “It’s all right,” they said at the same time.
“Let it out,” Nadine said. “It’s natural for little things to set off the grief.”
Jennie Sue straightened up and hiccuped. “It’s not fair.” She slapped the steering wheel. “Mama was coming around to understand that I was my own person. It’s not fair that I didn’t have more time with her and that neither of them will ever see my children.”
“Now, honey, that’s not true,” Nadine said softly. “They are with your little Emily Grace right now, taking care of her for you.”
“Do you really believe that?” Jennie Sue asked.
“Yes, I do,” Nadine answered.
“I want children,” Jennie Sue said softly. “I want a whole house full of them, not just one, and I don’t want to wait forever to start a family.”
Lettie raised an eyebrow. “Are you tellin’ us something?”
“No, but I wish I was.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
A big lovers’ moon hung low in the sky with a gazillion stars twinkling around it when Jennie Sue brought the Cadillac to a stop in front of the Lawson house. She fortified herself with a deep breath and slung open the car door. She stomped across the lawn, trying to build up a bigger head of steam with each step. Rick was not going to treat her this way. She refused to feel like something that had been thrown into the trash when it was no longer usable.
She rapped on the door frame and waited a few seconds. Then she grabbed the handle, determined that she’d go in without an invitation if she had to.
“Come on in,” Cricket yelled.
She poked her head in the door. Cricket was sitting on the sofa with her leg on the coffee table. “He’s not here. He’s down at the creek pouting. And the deed to this place is in the name of Richard or Edwina Lawson. That means I have a say-so without his signature, and I say you can have an easement across the property if you want to build a house back there by the creek.”
“Faster than the speed of light,” Jennie Sue said.
“Telephone, telegraph, tell-a-woman. The three things that are faster than lightning and twice as deadly.” Cricket nodded.
“Thank you.” Jennie Sue started to shut the door.
“Want to take a club with you? He’s pretty hardheaded,” Cricket yelled.
“Maybe I can handle it without violence.” Jennie Sue closed the door.
“If you can’t, call me. I’ll bring my crutches.”
Jennie Sue cracked the door back open. “Is he really that upset? And why?”
“He’s in the same place he was when he came home from the service. He won’t talk, and all he does is brood. If you can get him out of that, then you should put in a therapy room in the bookstore and hang out a shingle to help people,” Cricket said. “And then I might even like you as a friend and not hate you at all.”
“You’d do that for him?” Jennie Sue asked.
“Of course. He’s my brother,” Cricket answered.
Jennie Sue headed around the house toward the creek. She found Rick, sitting against the old oak tree with a mound of small rocks beside him. One by one he was tossing them out into the water. When he ran out of rocks, he waded out into the creek, gathered them back up in his shirttail, and went back to the tree to repeat the process.
If throwing rocks was therapy, then Jennie Sue figured that she should try it. “But I sure haven’t got the time to gather up a whole pile of them,” she whispered.
She looked around and found one the size of a softball and hurled it through the air. It hit the moon’s reflection right smack in the middle and splashed water all the way to Rick.
“Well, that didn’t cure anything. We still have to talk,” she muttered as she started toward him.