The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue (29 page)

“No hard feelings?” he said, looking young and eager once more.

I smiled. “No. No hard feelings.” I turned around, took Jim’s hand in mine, and started walking back toward Grace.

“Ellie! Wait! You cannot just leave me here,” Henri called as we walked away.

“C’mon,” Will said to Henri. “You’re going to booking.” I didn’t turn around again as Will hauled him away. Instead, I hurried
back to Grace.

“Officer McFarland says he’d be surprised if the DA charged you.” I slipped my hand out of Jim’s and held it out to Grace.
“So let’s get you home.”

She put her hand in mine, and then our strange little
posse moved toward the entrance. I said a little prayer of thanksgiving, because things could have turned out so much worse.

T
hat evening, when the excitement had died down and Jane and Linda had gone home, I remained at Grace’s house. Jim had left
a couple of hours earlier when the hospital paged him. I was grateful for a few minutes alone with Grace.

I’d ordered her to bed with instructions to rest while I fixed us some soup and crackers. Then I carried the food on a tray
to her room, just as Jim had done for me that morning. After the events of the day, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

“Why did you do it, Grace?” I asked when she was settled back against her pillows and eating. “Why did you go to the police
after all these years?”

She set her spoon down on the tray. “Maybe I just thought it was time.” She must have seen from the frown on my face that
I didn’t believe her, because she added, “Maybe you convinced me that the truth should be told.”

I still didn’t think she was telling the whole story. “Why did you do it? Really?”

“Because I didn’t want you to get in trouble.” Her vehement response wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

“Me? Why would I get in trouble?”

“When I told you the truth, I made you a party to the crime. I made my choice long ago to keep the secret and take any consequences
that came with that decision. But you didn’t.”

“You gave yourself up for me?” I wasn’t sure anyone had ever shown me that much loyalty in my whole life except for my mother.

Grace shrugged, trying to downplay the gravity of her decision. “What were they going to do to an old woman like me? Put me
in jail?”

“But they might have. You didn’t have to do that.”

“You still don’t understand, do you?”

“Understand what?”

“What it means to be one of the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue.”

I didn’t know what to say. Most people spent their entire lives searching for that kind of loyalty, and I had inadvertently
stumbled into it at my lowest point. Talk about your blessings in disguise. Underneath those red hats were the answers to
my prayers.

I took Grace’s hand in mine and lightly squeezed her fingers. “I think I’m beginning to,” I said. “Now, eat your soup.”

L
ater, after she’d finished her meal and I’d cleared away the dishes, I broached another difficult topic while perched on the
edge of Grace’s bed.

“I hope you’re not disappointed in me for taking Jim back.”

Grace leaned back against the pillow and sighed. “Did I ever tell you how I met my second husband, Fred? The one who took
me to the Cannon Ball?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“I met him at a bridge tournament. I’d gone alone, so I signed up at the partnership desk.”

“Partnership desk?”

“Tournaments always have them. For folks who don’t have someone to play with. They match you with someone at a similar skill
level.”

“And they matched you with Fred?”

Her dreamy smile was contagious, and I felt my own lips curve as the power of memory lit Grace’s face from within.

“We didn’t do so well in the tournament, but we did just fine for the next fifteen years. Until…”

“Until what?”

Her smile faded. “He had an affair.”

Again, Grace had managed to surprise me. Hadn’t she told me that she’d buried all three of her husbands with a smile on their
faces?

“What happened?”

“It didn’t last. He came back home, tail between his legs, but I wouldn’t have any of it.”

“But—”

“Then I went to another bridge tournament. I was single once again, so I signed up at the partnership desk.”

“Is that how you met your third husband?”

Grace laughed. “No. That’s how I wound up reconciling with Fred. You see, they assigned us as partners again.”

“And you played bridge with him?”

“By the end of the tournament, we were doing a lot more than playing bridge.” Her smile reminded me of the one I’d been wearing
when I’d awakened this morning.

I twisted the bedspread between my fingers, wanting
to ask a question but not wanting to intrude on a personal matter. Finally, I screwed up my courage and said, “And did he
ever cheat on you again?”

Grace looked me in the eye. “Not that I know of. But Ellie, there are no guarantees.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes, if the cosmic partnership desk keeps throwing the same guy in your path, someone may be trying to tell you something.”

Grace was giving her blessing to my reunion with Jim, but she was also warning me. Nothing was for sure. I just had to take
the hand I was dealt and play it the best I could.

“Thanks, Grace.” I leaned forward and brushed a kiss across her cheek. “You’ve been a tremendous help.”

Her eyes were starting to drift closed, so I tucked the sheet up around her and stood up. “I’ll do the dishes and then lock
up when I leave.”

“Thank you, Ellie. You’re a good girl.”

“Good night, Grace.” Down the short hallway to the kitchen from her bedroom, I fought back tears. Grace’s words about being
a good girl echoed in my head. It was exactly what my mother used to say, and to tell the truth, I hadn’t always believed
it. Now, though, after half a century, I had finally figured out one thing.

Being good and being perfect were mutually exclusive. And since I’d never be the latter, I could only be the former. In the
end, being good was good enough. It would have to be.

CH
A
PTER
TWENTY-ONE

J
im didn’t come back to my house that evening, so I assumed he’d had to go back into surgery. I was grateful for the reprieve,
because I had a lot of thinking to do. His blithe assumption that now that we’d reconciled in the bedroom I’d move right back
into the rest of the house still bothered me.

I slept like a log and woke the next morning to find my refrigerator was as empty as my stomach. There was nothing for it
but to throw on some clothes and make a quick run to Harris-Teeter. Of course, since I looked less than my best, I ran into
lots of people I knew. One person stopped me in the bread aisle to rave about the carriage rides. Another expressed similar
praise in front of the Saran Wrap and Ziploc bags. The one that really got to me, though, was when I ran into Cissy Crawford,
a fixture in Nashville society, in front of the potato chips.

“I’m so glad Roz thought of the horse and carriage
idea. Brilliant. Simply brilliant. I wish I’d done it when I was the chair.”

My face froze, and I couldn’t do anything but smile and nod. I was too stunned to set Cissy straight. At least, I was too
stunned until I started pushing my cart forward again and looked up to see my nemesis heading straight toward me, her own
cart piled high.

“Ellie.” She greeted me with a curt nod. “You look terrible. Are you ill?”

After our last confrontation in this grocery store, I’d been ready to let bygones be bygones, live and let live, etc. Clearly
Roz’s antipathy for me had very little to do with reality and a lot more to do with her crazy mother. But her taking credit
for my Cannon Ball success was too much.

“Roz.” I returned her chilly nod. “I understand you’re due some congratulations.”

Her eyes narrowed, suddenly wary. “Am I?”

“I understand you had the brilliant idea to hire the carriages instead of using shuttle buses for the ball.”

She blushed underneath her layers of LaPrairie makeup. “I’m sure I never—”

“I’m pretty sure you ‘never,’ too.”

I was ready to blast her, to pin her to the wall with the force of my righteous indignation. After the last two months, I
felt powerful enough to do it. A heady sense of command rose up in me. Finally, after all these years, I could take my enemy
out at the knees, leaving her decimated and crippled right here in front of the Pringles.

And then I looked at Roz again. Really looked at her. I saw underneath the layers of expensive makeup, beyond
the plastic surgery, deep into her normally brown eyes that were concealed behind blue contact lenses. At that moment, the
need for revenge drained away. What good would it do? What point would it prove?

Instead, I said, “I’m going to send you something in the mail.”

She blinked twice, confused. “What?”

“I’m going to send you something in the mail. My birth certificate.”

She pursed her lips. “What would I do with your birth certificate?”

I smiled. Not in a Cruella De Vil kind of way. Just in a normal way. A relieved way. The old Ellie way.

“You can use it to put your fears to rest. We’re not sisters. Your dad had nothing to do with me.”

I knew better than to expect any kind of gratitude or similarly human response. Instead, I reached out, took a bag of pretzels
from the shelf on my right, and tossed them into my cart.

She collected herself, and her spine went ramrod straight. “You can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“You can’t just say something like that and assume that it’s over.”

I could see in her eyes that the loss of our rivalry scared her. I had some sympathy for that. She’d been a part of how I
defined myself for so long that it was like pulling up an anchor or letting go of a lifeline. And yet, how could either of
us ever move forward if we didn’t let go?

“Have a good day, Roz.”

I grabbed my cart by the handle, and with my head
held high, I pushed it past her, leaving her behind me, right where she belonged.

M
y trip to Harris-Teeter took longer than I had expected. Before I could get out of the store, I’d had to stop to hear three
more rave reviews for the transportation at the Cannon Ball, talked to two women (divorcées, like myself) who had heard about
Your Better Half and wanted to know if I was hiring, and been given the eye (and some free peaches) by the produce manager.
All in all, not bad for a trip to the grocery store.

When I pulled into my driveway, though, another surprise lay in wait. Jim’s sleek little car was there.

“Here goes nothing,” I muttered as I grabbed the grocery bags from the back seat and made my way up the walk. He wasn’t on
the porch, though, as I’d expected. I turned the key and went in the house, but he wasn’t there, either. Curious. And then
I heard the strange sounds coming from the backyard. I walked to the kitchen, plopped the bags on the counter, and looked
out the window.

With Grace’s help, the view from my kitchen window had undergone a transformation. And while I hadn’t yet achieved the lushness
of her English garden backyard, I was doing pretty well. The best-looking thing between me and the fence, however, happened
to be Jim, shirtless and sweating, as he dug up the flower bed at the rear of the yard.

Irritation flashed through me at first as I watched his well-muscled arms thrust the shovel into the ground, and then his
spine curve and flex as he used one foot to push
it into the ground. I even admired his backside, one of his best features, actually, as he bent to lift the dirt from the
hole and then sent it flying off to the growing mound on his right. How unfair that a fifty-year-old man could look so good
when I’d looked so awful after doing the same thing.

Quickly I put away the groceries that needed to be refrigerated, and then I was vain enough to make a quick stop in front
of the bathroom mirror to fluff my hair and apply some lipstick. Not more than three minutes later, though, I was letting
myself out the back door and crossing the yard.

“What are you doing?” I kept my voice carefully neutral.

Jim cast a quick look at me over his shoulder before thrusting the shovel into the ground yet again. He had to be getting
pretty deep by this time.

“I’m digging.”

“Yes. I can see that.”

Okay, I’ll admit a little thrill shot through me. He was very determined, very matter-of-fact, and the hair at the nape of
his neck clung in sweaty little clumps that looked really manly.

I stopped when I was a few feet away from him. “Why are you digging up my impatiens?”

He threw a last shovelful of dirt onto the pile, struck the shovel into the ground, and leaned on the handle. “I’m retrieving
something.”

Another thrill followed the last one up my spine. “Buried treasure?” This time, I could keep my tone
neutral but I couldn’t keep the corners of my mouth from turning upward.

“Yep.” He pulled a bandana from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped his forehead. I had to admit, the man still had a great
pair of pecs. Cracking open people’s chests was pretty physical work when you got right down to it.