Chapter Five

When I walked through the entrance of Dixie’s Diner, most of the merry patrons returned their attention to the piles of food in front of them, but a few couldn’t keep their eyes from ping-ponging back and forth between Tyler and me as he pulled away.

The only person openly glaring was Ruthie.

“Sit.” The wooden legs of the chair across from her grated against the floor as she shoved it with her foot. “What did the un­dependable, shallow egomaniac want?”

I glanced at the two women on each side of her—Ruthie’s aunt Velma and her mother, Lynda—and wished we were alone. Tyler’s appearance rattled me, and I would have liked to discuss it with my friend … but not her entire family.

I eased into the seat, scooting back an inch to account for my swollen belly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t play stupid.” Ruthie smirked.

Velma’s plump palm patted my arm. “Aw, Ruthie, give the girl a break. Plain as day the boy caught her off guard.”

A grunt of disgust came from Ruthie’s mother, but she didn’t look up from the laminated menu. She merely raised one condescending eyebrow and tucked her hair behind her ear. I never knew what to make of Lynda Turner.

My mother once described her as an unambitious small-town floozy, but Mother, understandably, was biased.

Velma Pickett, on the other hand, she described as homemade soap—functional, old-fashioned, not much to look at. But ironically, Ruthie’s aunt Velma, more often than her mother, caused a stifling wave of guilt to press against me like a sauna. Even though she hadn’t set foot in a church building since her marriage to Ansel thirty years before, she still had more jewels in her crown than I ever would.

All three women shared the same skeptical brown eyes, compelling me to open my own menu. “Tyler asked about the baby. He didn’t want anything.”

“Tyler Cruz?” Lynda finally spoke. “Wanting nothing?”

Ruthie glanced at her mother out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t rebuke her the way she often did.

“The man doesn’t exactly have a good track record for love and devotion,” Lynda said.

She had worked at the diner over a year, so she had no reason to read that menu. She merely used it as a prop to hide behind, like a hot-wire fence separating her from the rest of the world.

I pressed my lips together to keep from snapping at her. The woman had every right to hate my family. Especially my father. “I know Tyler’s a mess, but so am I.”

“No, you’re not,” Ruthie said. “You’re making something of your life and taking responsibility for your actions.” Her head jerked to the window. “He’s only flumping along doing whatever feels right in the moment.”

“You don’t even know what he said.”

“I bet I can guess.” Lynda slapped her menu against the table. “He loves you, he wants to do right by you, he misses you. And the best line … he’ll never let it happen again.”

I squirmed in the wooden chair. “What makes you think he said any of that?”

“She’s heard it before,” Ruthie said with an implied duh in her tone.

They were ganging up on me. “He apologized for what happened in April.”

Lynda’s eyes rolled so dramatically, they seemed to pull an exasperated sigh from the depths of her lungs. “Good grief, those two men are just alike.” She glared desperately at Velma. “How can she not see it?” Lynda didn’t wait for an answer from her sister but stood and stalked out of the diner.

As the cow bell on the doorframe clanked against the thick glass, indignation swarmed through my lungs like a cloud of angry bees. No matter how well Lynda Turner knew my father, she didn’t have the right to criticize him.

Velma tsked as the waitress approached, and I quickly skimmed the menu for the lowest priced item. “I’ll have the fried zucchini.”

“She’ll also have an order of chicken and dumplings,” declared Velma to the waitress, “with okra and corn on the side. Same for me.”

“Me, too,” Ruthie said.

The baby chose that moment to kick me in the ribs, and I sat up straight and rubbed my side. “Thanks, Velma.”

She watched me as she sipped her sweet tea and then set her glass down with a thump, obviously forging the conversation in a new direction. “How’s your new home?”

The woman could read my moods like a gypsy fortune-teller. “I get lonely out there.”

“I can come over more often.” Ruthie’s statement seemed to double as an unspoken regret for her mother’s outburst.

“You come over plenty.” I fiddled with the silverware bundle on the table. “I just miss campus life.”

Ruthie raised an eyebrow. “Partying and spending money?”

“Don’t be ugly.” The older woman’s chin jutted, and I got the impression she expected Ruthie to apologize then and there.

“She’s a Blaylock, Aunt Velma. She can’t help it.”

“For crying out loud, Ruth Ann.”

But Ruthie hit the target. I missed my right-side-up world, and my stubborn will was bucking the changes. “I’m not like my parents … I mean I’m not like my father.”

“Oh, Fawn.” Ruthie rubbed her palms over her face. “It’s not your dad that has Momma upset. It’s you.”

Velma chuckled. “My sister might not show it, but she cares.”

I almost laughed out loud. Lynda Turner cared for me about as much as a hawk cares for a field mouse. “Yeah, right. It’s obvious from the kindness she’s shown over the years.”

“That’s Lynda, darlin’,” Velma soothed. “Her love’s prickly, but it doesn’t make it any less real.”

A tractor rumbled down Main Street, and I gazed at it blindly, lost in thought. A person like me, with only one friend—two if I counted Velma—had no room to be picky when it came to affection.

“Well, at least your mother speaks to me,” I said. “That’s more than I can say for mine.” I took a sip of ice water, and as its cool wetness washed the soot of bitterness from my lungs, I said a silent prayer, thanking God for these women He placed in my life. It was true Ruthie looked down on my sorority sisters, her aunt Velma naturally upstaged me and my sinful ways, and her mother resented my father so much she could never forgive, but the three of them cared about me.

Certainly they weren’t the people I would have chosen for the job, but nevertheless, they were all I had. And their words of concern, painful though they were, floated around in my brain the rest of the day.