The Scent of Lilacs (14 page)

“Your dad speechless? I should’ve been there to see that.”

“Yeah, I know. Anyway, Tabitha doesn’t look much like I remember. Her hair is long and straight, almost down to her waist. And she had on a funky loose top and bright green pants and sandals. And then that rose painted on her cheek. I think it’s just painted on. I’ve never seen a girl with a real tattoo.”

“I thought about getting a tattoo once,” Wes said. “But I couldn’t remember what the Jupiterian spaceship laws said about foreign ink coming back into the home planet zone. I didn’t want to have to slice off a piece of my skin before I could go home.”

“You’re a nut,” Jocie said with a grin and then looked over her shoulder as if she expected Zella or her father to be sneaking up on them. No one was in the pressroom but Wes and her, but still she kept her voice low as she asked Wes, “Do you think she’s a hippie?”

“Could be. Coming from California and all. Why don’t you ask her?”

“I might. Later, after she gets rested up. I might ask her lots of things,” Jocie said, thinking about her mother again.

Nobody liked talking about her mother. Aunt Love said she had never said more than “How do you do?” to her a few times, and you didn’t get to know much about a person that way. Wes said pretty much the same thing, that he didn’t know enough about her to tell Jocie, and her father looked like she was poking him with needles every time she said anything about her mother. Most people in Hollyhill acted as if Jocie had never even had a mother. But Tabitha shouldn’t mind talking about her. And she’d know things no one in Hollyhill could know.

The door opened, and her father came in the pressroom. “Any coffee left out here?” he asked.

“You bet, boss. Strong and so thick we can use it for ink if we run low,” Wes said.

Jocie grabbed a cup off the shelf over the coffeepot and poured her dad a cup. She waved the coffee under her nose before she
handed it to her father. “Whew. Maybe this was what Zella had for breakfast instead of prunes.”

“Nah. This is too much coffee for a mere woman like Zella. It takes a man to swallow something this vile,” Wes said as he finished off what was left in his cup and held it out to Jocie for more.

“It might be time to clean the pot,” David said as he looked at the black liquid in his cup.

“I’ve heard that takes the taste away,” Wes said.

“One could only hope.” David took a swig and swallowed with a grimace. “But it does have a way of popping the eyes open.”

“Wide open,” Wes said. “Which is what a newspaperman wants. Jo was just telling me that Tabby showed up on your doorstep last night. She okay?”

“Tired. Half sick from the trip, but okay.” David sipped the brew in his cup.

“She tell you why she’s here?” Wes asked.

“Not yet,” David said.

Jocie jumped in. “What do you mean why she’s here? Maybe she just wanted to come. Maybe she wanted to see Dad.”

“She say she’s just visiting?” Wes asked.

“I think she’s planning to stay awhile,” David said.

“Hollyhill’s going to be a change for her. Jo here says she looks like a real California girl.”

“A flower child for sure,” David said. “But still my daughter.”

“A father should take care of his daughter.” Wes stared down at his coffee.

“As best a father can. No father can keep every bad thing from happening,” David said softly.

“Well, we ain’t gonna get no paper out standing around yammering all day,” Wes said. “Let’s get started on those Bible school ads. Come one, come all. We’ll teach you how to spell Jesus in macaroni on a plate.”

“Oh, Wes,” Jocie said. “Bible school is fun. You get to eat cookies till you’re sick and sing and play tag. I never met a kid who didn’t like Bible school.”

“Homemade cookies?” Wes said.

“Sure. Sometimes even cupcakes.”

“Am I too old to give it a try?” Wes asked, his smile back in place.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the preacher,” Jocie said.

Wes peered over at David. “Do we have one in the room? Am I looking at Mt. Pleasant’s newest and finest? The Right Reverend Brooke?”

“Brother David will do,” David said.

“So you got the vote,” Wes said.

“Actually, one vote short of what I asked for, but one vote didn’t seem to be enough reason to turn them down. It’ll be just a few months till they find somebody full-time. Of course, I haven’t talked to Matt McDermott yet this morning. He doesn’t know Tabitha’s home.”

“What difference could that make? Give you sermon fodder. The prodigal daughter comes home.” Wes put his hand on Jocie’s shoulder. “And the faithful other daughter is as happy as you are. She’s ready for the feast. You’re going to invite me too, aren’t you?”

Jocie giggled. She thought of Tabitha waking up in her room, maybe pulling the box of her old stuff out of the closet. Some of the stuff would make her laugh. Some would make her cry. And then she’d go downstairs, where Aunt Love would greet her with some Scripture. Maybe something like “Good sleep is a gift of God.” Jocie wasn’t sure that was in the Bible, but it might be. Maybe with somebody else in the house to pile Scripture on, Aunt Love would let up a little on her.

Jocie mashed her mouth together to keep from giggling again. Her father and Wes would think she’d been drinking giggle juice. She thought of Zeb digging a hole in the dirt under the porch to
stay cool till she got home. She thought of the stars through the window the night before. She remembered that “If you’re happy and you know it” Bible school song. She wanted to clap her hands and stomp her feet and shout amen all at the same time.

“I’ll plan the feast right after I figure out what we’re going to run on the front page this week,” her father was saying.

“You got the picture of the twin calves,” Wes said. “And it’s Bible school season in our little holy Hollyhill. You could let Jo here write up something about the wonders of Bible school. She seems to be a fan. We’re sure to have some pictures of kids running wild around a churchyard in the files somewhere.”

“You could write about Tabitha coming home,” Jocie suggested.

“I don’t think so,” David said. “Tabitha might not like seeing her name in the paper the week she comes back. Of course, the mayor wants the town to start planning a big Fourth of July bash. I told him I’d do an editorial, but we might just spread it on the front. Make people notice.”

“How about the new preacher at Mt. Pleasant? New preachers are always newsworthy,” Wes said. “I could come out to the house and take a picture of you and Tabby and Jo and Love like you’d just moved in. Get the whole family. That way everybody would get a look at Tabby and wouldn’t have to come up with excuses to drop by your house to see her with their own eyes.”

“You may be on to something there,” David said. “Folks are going to be curious for sure.”

“Well, see. We’ve got the front page more than full already, and we’ve got Little League games and a bumper crop of wedding announcements,” Wes said. “Who says exciting stuff doesn’t happen in Hollyhill?”

“You, I think,” Jocie said.

“None of that back talk.” Wes gave her a little shove toward the composing table where the Bible school ads were waiting. “You ain’t got time. The presses have to start rolling tomorrow
afternoon, and if I ain’t missing my guess, you haven’t got the first word of that Bible school piece written. Not to mention the ads set up.”

“And maybe I could interview the mayor and some others about the Fourth,” Jocie said. “We studied about it in school, but that was just history book stuff.”

“Getting our town leaders to tell a kid what Independence Day means to them. That might work. And I could hunt up some kids to see what they think Independence Day is. Great idea, Jocie,” her father said.

“I could start with you,” Jocie said.

“I better save my thunder for my editorial. I have to fill up that page too.”

“Well, then how about you, Wes? Just for practice. What’s the Fourth mean to you?”

“Up on Jupiter, we don’t have Independence Day, but . . .”

“Come on, Wes. You know I can’t write about Jupiter for this,” Jocie interrupted him. “It has to be all American pie. Stuff like that.”

“Okay, no Jupiter history today. You might have liked the story, but oh well. If it’s Earth stuff you want, it’s Earth stuff you’ll get.” Wes looked at the press behind him as if words might be forming on the iron pieces. “Fireworks. Hot dogs. Ripe, juicy watermelons. Naps.”

Jocie had grabbed a pencil to take notes. She looked up. “Naps?”

“Yeah, while the politicians tell you how great they are. You’ll have to get toothpicks to prop open your eyes when you talk to the mayor,” Wes said.

“I’ll tell him he has to limit it to five things, no more than two words each.”

“He couldn’t even tell you his name without using more words than that,” Wes said. He raised his voice a couple of octaves.
“Mayor Raymond Palmor, that’s me. But people just call me Buzz in the best little town in America. Because I made it that way. Single-handedly. Don’t forget that when you vote next year. Keep the Buzz going in Hollyhill.”

“Don’t let him hear that one,” David said as he turned to go back to his office. “He’d want us to change the name of the
Banner
to the
Buzz Banner
.”

Jocie settled down to work on the ads, but while she was cutting and cropping and fitting in the words, she kept thinking about the other stories she was supposed to write. The Bible school piece would be easy. She had lots of experience with Bible school. The summer she was eight, the perfect Bible school age, she’d gone to ten different Bible schools. By the time summer was over, she could have taught the Bible lessons blindfolded, and she had a whole shelf full of egg carton caterpillars, pencil holders made from soup cans, macaroni-encrusted plates, and coasters with her picture stuck in the bottom.

Her Mama Mae had made a fuss over each of them as if they were works of art. When Mama Mae had died the following fall, Jocie had slipped one of the coasters into the coffin when nobody was looking. She could still remember how stiff and wrong her grandmother’s arm had felt when she’d touched it. She’d had nightmares about it for months after that, but she’d never been sorry she’d put the coaster picture in the coffin. She didn’t want her grandmother to forget what she looked like before she saw her again in heaven.

T
hey ran the papers Tuesday afternoon. Even Zella got her hands black assembling the pages fresh off the press for dis- tribution, but she was an old pro at it, folding papers long before David or Wes had even thought about working in a newspaper office. On Tuesdays she always wore a navy skirt and white button-up blouse that somehow stayed white. She never scratched her nose or rubbed her eyes until the last paper was folded, while the rest of them generally ended a folding session spotted like Dalmatian pups.

For David it was always the best moment of the work week when he took the first paper off the pile and sat down and unfolded it as if he were on his front porch settling in to catch up on the town’s news. As he looked over this week’s front page, he nodded his approval.

Jocie blew out a long breath and smiled. Her piece on Bible schools was on the bottom of the front page. The picture of the twin calves had made the top fold of the paper. Twin calves happened only once in a blue moon, and although everybody in the county had probably heard about the calves by now, David was banking on them wanting to see a picture for proof.

They hadn’t been able to find a kids-in-the-churchyard picture, so Wes had designed a VBS logo that David figured some of the churches would cut out to use in their Sunday bulletins. Wes had worked in a Bible, a smiling kid’s face, and a cross. David pulled
the paper up for a closer look at the top of the S. “Wes, tell me I don’t see snake eyes on that S.”

“Snakes are biblical. One old serpent had a right important part at the beginning, I’m told,” Wes said.

“Snake? Where’s a snake?” Jocie said as she grabbed a paper off the pile.

Zella peered over Jocie’s shoulder. “Wesley Green, if we have to run another front page, the cost is coming out of your pay,” she said.

“We aren’t doing a new run,” David said. “The Lord mostly smudged it out for us, but Wes, there are some things you shouldn’t play around with. If church people quit buying the
Banner
, we’re sunk.”

“Not to mention the danger of losing advertising dollars during Bible school and revival season,” Zella put in.

Jocie clapped her hand over her mouth to hide her smile and smudged more black on her cheeks.

“It’s not the least bit amusing, Jocelyn,” Zella said.

Jocie couldn’t help it. She laughed out loud. “Oh, come on, Zella. Nobody but us will know it’s a snake, and if they do we’ll give it a close-up look and admit that if you use your imagination that ink smudge the press made might look a little bit like snake eyes.”

Zella gave Wes a withering look. “Wesley Green, someday you’ll have to give an accounting of the ways you’ve led this child astray.”

“Aw, Zell, it’s just a couple of snake eyes. A body’s got to have some fun,” Wes said. “If you don’t start practicing smiling every now and again, one of these days you’re going to come across something so funny you won’t be able to keep from smiling and then your face is liable to crack.”