Page 20 of The Party Line

“Was she one of thosenumber, pleaseoperators?” I asked.

“Nope,” Everett answered. “But she loved to ease that receiver up off the base and listen in on other people’s conversations. I tried it a couple of times when I was a kid, but I never could master the art of listening without the other two parties hearing the click.”

“‘Click’?” Connor asked.

“When someone who was on the party line picked up the receiver, there was a certain noise,” Jasper told him. “You had to hold the button down and ease it up very gently. If you were lucky, someone would be laughing so hard on the other end that they didn’t realize anyone was eavesdropping.”

“And you always had to put your hand over the mouthpiece because if the two parties heard you breathing, it was all over,” Everett added.

“When did the party lines end?” I asked.

“People around here stopped using them in the early sixties,” Jasper said.

I poured myself a cup of tea and took a sip. “There are still some of Aunt Gracie’s phones in the house. One in my bedroom and one in hers.”

“Black phones with no dial,” Everett remembered with a smile.

I chose a turkey-and-cheese sandwich from the stack. “Yep, and very heavy. People who own them should have to register them as weapons.”

Connor chuckled. “Want me to go down to the police station with you?”

“Why would I do that?” I asked in between bites.

“If you have WMDs in your house, shouldn’t you let the chief of police know?” he teased.

“I’d say what folks heard when they were eavesdropping was far more deadly than any weapons of mass destruction can be these days.” Jasper’s face was set in stone, and his eyes were haunted.

“Why would you say that?” He looked like he was about to have a stroke right there, with a sandwich in one hand and a red plastic cup of sweet tea in the other one.

After a second or two, he smiled and pointed toward Sassy, who was sitting at his side and begging for bites of his lunch. “How do you like Sassy’s collar? I rigged it up by using an old belt that got too big for me. The leash is another belt that never did fit me.”

“That is pitiful looking,” I told him, deciding to live with his rapid subject change. “I’ll order her a proper collar and leash this afternoon. It should be here in a couple of days.”

He pursed his lips and said, “She’smydog, so youwillbring me the receipt, and I will pay for it.”

“Yes, sir.” I saluted him.

“Not bad,” Connor chuckled. “Were you in the service?”

“Nope. You better grab that last sandwich before ...” My thoughts shifted so quickly that I forgot what I was about to say.

“Before what?” Connor asked.

“When you asked about the service, my mind went to Aunt Gracie, and Davis, and Jasper leaving for the military, and I wondered if she wanted to go with them,” I admitted.

“Girls didn’t go into the service back then,” Jasper said.

“Did Aunt Gracie go to college?”

“No.” Jasper shook his head. “When me and Davis went into the military, Gracie went to work in a dress shop in Poteet. A few years later, after I came home and Davis didn’t, she bought the place and ran it until she retired. She hadn’t been retired very long when she took your mama in and kept you so Sarah could work.”

“What happened to the dress shop?” I made a mental note to ask Mama about that part of Gracie’s life.

Jasper scratched his head and frowned. “Let’s see now. She sold it, and the next owners didn’t take care of business right, and so it closed up after a couple of years. There was a doughnut shop in the building for a while, but it folded up years ago, too.”

“My mother loved to shop in Gracie’s store,” Everett said.

Party lines, dress shops, Jasper being careful not to tell me what he knew—how did it all fit together?

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