Chapter One — Company’s Coming
At age sixty-five it is hard for me to get excited about much of anything. Been there, done that and didn’t want the crumby T-shirt anyhow. So sue me. I know that’s a cliché but it is how I feel! Now my cotton-pickin’ niece and her dadblamed kids are coming to stay with me, and what is that all about? What? They think I have oodles of money so they can mooch off me and I won’t say anything? Well, they have another think coming!
Lilly Irish swiped at her slightly pointed nose with the back of her non-writing hand—she was a righty not a lefty—and sniffed.
I don’t even know that girl to speak of. Now she’s desperate and calling on me for help. Children are probably snotty like so many nowadays; wouldn’t surprise me one whit. Why is she coming to me? All I have is my part time job at ShopMart, lucky me, and Social Security. How am I supposed to take in four people? I still have Michael and Elizabeth’s college loans to pay off. Harve’s insurance took care of some of it, but not all by any means. What am I going to do?
She twiddled the pen threading it through her fingers and back again experiencing a degree of pride that she could do that. A lot of the women she knew—and some of the old fart men as well—were too crippled up with arthritis to hold a pen, much less get creative with it. Not as bad off as some and not so well off as others, she thought as she returned to her journal.
Well, it is what it is, as Harve used to say. I can’t turn away my sister’s child and her children, God knows. She’d find a way to make my life miserable if I did, never mind she’s been dead for nearly twenty years.
Lilly sniffed again, blinked back the sudden sting in her eyes and coughed away the catch in her throat; funny how it could hit her right in the heart sometimes.
Milly and Lilly. What were Mom and Dad thinking? We weren’t even twins, for goodness sake. They just wanted me to be a mini Milly, like that was going to happen.
She could still picture her sister, beautiful in the way some girls are, wholesome looking yet sexy. Lilly hadn’t envied Milly the attention she got, or that she was the most popular girl in school. She didn’t even resent knowing their parents favored her sister—Milly Marie, the perfect daughter. Even after Milly ran off all her mom and dad talked about was how much they missed her and how she’d wasted her potential and wasn’t it a shame she lived so far away? Lilly got sick of it fast, especially when they would stay home all the time in case they might, just might,get a call from their beloved Milly. By her senior year Lilly had given up on her folks showing up at her events and activities. Milly was older than Lilly by fourteen months. They’d grown up as close as any two sisters could be until Milly took off with that Hadley boy. Her mother nearly died of shock and her father never did get over it. They were both at peace with the Lord now, thank God, and didn’t have to fret about Milly. If they’d lived to know Milly died of massive head trauma after an accident that involved a drunken Trey Hadley driving into a tree, grief would have killed them anyway.
Milly had been in misery from the get-go in her ill-advised marriage, but she was pure stubborn through and through and wouldn’t admit she’d made a mistake. Staying with the son of buck after their first baby died at birth wasn’t the best idea but that was Milly for you.
Saddest of all Trey had survived the accident that killed her sister only to drink himself to death over the next four years. Annie, their only child, had disappeared not long after his funeral.
It had happened so long ago, longer than Lilly wanted to think about. They were all gone, Mom, Dad, Milly, Harve.
Now Annie and her children were on their way. She had agreed to let them move in temporarily. “Until I get on my feet,” Annie had said, her voice on the phone sounding hauntingly like that of her long dead mother.
Lilly hadn’t seen much of the girl, mostly at funerals. First Mom’s following a long bout with cancer, and then Dad’s six months later. A heart attack; hit him like a load of bricks. Within a year Milly was gone and then Trey. The wan, skinny, brown-haired child’s face didn’t even register as a memory other than a sullen mouth, which was to be expected, Lilly thought. After all her mother had died because of her father’s stupidity and then he’d drunk himself to death. What must that be to live with?
At each of the funerals the child had been all but unapproachable. At Milly’s service she still showed marks from injuries she had sustained in the accident, most of them superficial. She had been wearing her seatbelt and her mother hadn’t. Annie had hardly spoken, standing sullenly next to her father who seemed unaware of where he was, much less able to grasp what was happening. Somehow he’d managed to stay out of jail, although Lilly thought he should have been prosecuted for vehicular homicide. That’s what she’d told Harve.
Harve merely shook his head and asked, “And what would happen to Annie?”
As it turned out Trey apparently didn’t care about Annie because four years later they attended his funeral, his death a combination of alcohol and drug abuse. Annie, older, bitter and surlier, only said one thing to her and Harve. “I’m not going to live with you!”
That was a bit of a shock because Lilly hadn’t considered taking her in. Harve would have, but not Lilly. Harve’s children were in their adolescent years. It was challenge enough remaining sane with Elizabeth smarting off one minute and sobbing wretchedly the next, and an amiable if sometimes difficult Michael staying out with his friends ‘til all hours doing who knew what. Not serious enough to land in jail mind you, but pushing the limits all the time, being an embarrassment every chance he got. Taking on Milly’s child would have been more than they—or at least Lilly—could have handled.
Trey Hadley’s folks had taken Annie in but she hadn’t remained with them long, maybe a month, and then she’d disappeared. Lilly hadn’t heard a thing about her in the intervening years; now here she was on her way, with three youngsters in tow.
Best not to think too hard on this. We’ll see how it goes. They won’t be here long.
She laid the pen aside, closed the cover on her journal and stood.
Lilly was a prim, small woman with perhaps a little too much weight around the belly. She disguised it with clothing that didn’t cling, thinking it made her look thinner. All it did was make her look shorter and wider. Her hair, worn in a tidy bun, was dyed an unflatteringly dark shade of brown that did nothing to enhance her looks. Her gold wire-rimmed glasses hid her most remarkable feature, dark green eyes framed by long dark lashes.
She started to walk away and leave her journal on the desk where she always left it. She could no longer do that, not with a bunch of strangers in the house. She was brutally honest about what she wrote. She might prance delicately around everything in her dealings with people from day to day, but she didn’t write anything she didn’t feel or believe to be true. Someday, when she was dead, somebody would read her journals and know she hadn’t been a nice person at all, not that it would matter; she’d be gone. It gave her perverse satisfaction that Elizabeth or Michael would one day find out how much they’d hurt her by their indifference. Harve, bless him, had always chalked their actions up to growing pains and found ways to overlook behavior that left her livid. Of course, they were his children, not hers, as they were disposed to remind her in moments of high dudgeon.
Lilly shook her head. No use thinking about that. She picked up the journal and carried it down the hall to her bedroom, tucking it into a drawer in the bedside table, laying it on top of a book already there.
She realized with some frustration that with the arrival of strangers she had lost her privacy. A
