Page 21 of The Party Line

Connor covered my hand with his, and a spark sizzled between us. “Now, what are you thinking about so hard?” he whispered.

He removed his hand, but the chemistry was still there when I looked up into his eyes. “The past,” I said, but my voice sounded a little deeper than normal in my own ears.

Jasper and Everett were talking about what stores were in Poteet back in their younger days, so Connor continued to whisper. “That’s done and gone. The present is what we have. The hope is that we will even have a future.”

“I thought you were a soldier, not a philosopher.”

“I am many things, Miz Lila, and I’m sure you are, too. Maybe we can get to know each other a little better even after strawberry-picking season is over?”

“Maybe so.” I nodded, but I’d have to think long and hard about that. “After all, wearefriends.”

“That’s right, and I’ll be at your house on Saturday morning with muffins.” He grinned.

Chapter Seven

The last thing on Aunt Gracie’s to-do list was to clean out her room, give anything usable to the women’s shelter in San Antonio, and toss the rest of the stuff in the trash. I spaced out as I stood in the doorway and stared at the four-poster bed where she’d died. My feet didn’t want to take a step inside the room, and yet my heart ached to find closure. I shifted my focus over to the vanity, with its big round mirror where she sat to put on her makeup. The very idea of going through her things seemed like an invasion of privacy.

“Don’t come back and haunt me.” I opened the door all the way, entered the room, and stepped back in time almost a hundred years. Over in one corner was a wooden cradle filled with dolls that had been Aunt Gracie’s when she was a little girl. Their names were Dolly, Emma, and Maudie. I’d rocked each one of them to sleep when I was little, and then Aunt Gracie and I would tiptoe over to the cradle and lay them down for a nap. Those sweet babies were definitely not going into the trash can.

I picked up Emma and sat down in the wooden rocking chair.“Shhh, hush, little baby. Lila loves you,”I sang to the doll like Aunt Gracie had taught me to do before I could even pronounce the words.

As I rocked the doll, I scanned the rest of the room. Nothing had changed since the days when I played here, back when my feet didn’t even touch the floor. The red satin bedspread looked like it belonged in a brothel instead of on a fancy white four-poster bed, and it sure didn’tmatch the pink-rose wallpaper. Her makeup sat on a mirrored tray on the vanity, which had probably been bought at the same time as the bed.

A vision of Aunt Gracie sitting on the white velvet stool came to my mind. I must have been about six years old, and it had to have been on a Friday night because she was getting ready for her poker game.

“Someday, when you are old enough, I’ll show you how to apply makeup,” she had said. “The trick is to put it on in such a way that it looks like natural beauty. Don’t plaster it on to try to cover your freckles. Own them and everything else that makes you who you are. Don’t be ashamed of your height, your hair, or your body. God gave them to you.”

I kissed Emma on the forehead and laid her back in the cradle with her two sisters, then crossed the room and stared at my reflection in the mirror—freckles and red hair—neither one had changed with age. I could not force myself to throw away the makeup or give away the tray.

Seemed like I’d been drawn to the vanity, so evidently that was the place to start. I opened the first drawer on the right. It was organized, with bobby pins, a hairbrush, a comb, and a tube of the stuff I remember her rubbing into her dark hair to make it shine—all in a sectioned tray that fit perfectly in the drawer. The second one held a dozen pair of red silk underpants. Had I somehow gotten in the wrong room? Surely Aunt Gracie had not worn those things. I tossed them all onto the bed and dug deeper, thinking that there would be white cotton granny panties in the drawer, the ones old ladies were supposed to wear—like what I basically had in a size larger than Aunt Gracie would have worn. All I found at the very bottom of the drawer was one of those antique-looking pink diaries that little girls used back then. Nowadays, they have a blog or a journal on their laptops.

I picked it up and held it in my hands for several seconds before using the little key taped to the back to unlock it. The first entry put a smile on my face:Dear Diary, Mama gave you to me for my birthday. November 11, 1940. Davis and Jasper told me that I would throw you ina drawer and forget you, but I promise I won’t. I may not write in you every day, but I promise to tell you all about my life at least once a week.

On Valentine’s Day she wrote that she’d asked for a red bedspread and panties that weren’t white instead of a heart-shaped box of candy, but she had not gotten either. Her mother had told her that good little girls did not wear colored underwear and red was for grown women who weren’t very nice. Gracie penned that someday she would have both, no matter what anyone thought.

“Her first act of rebellion,” I whispered.

Every entry mentioned Davis and Jasper. They went to their freshman year of high school in Poteet, sat together on the bus, talked about their parents and what they would do when they left Ditto and were out into the world. I remembered having the same feelings, but I didn’t have best friends like Davis or Jasper to share them with. Looking back, the people I had known were more like acquaintances than friends, and even most of them had left the area.

Things began to change toward the end of the summer between their freshman and sophomore years. Jasper wasn’t mentioned as often as Davis. In the fall of that year, he held her hand on the bus ride home and brought her a bouquet of roses he’d picked from his mama’s flower garden out behind their house.

Davis had kissed her after the big hot dog and marshmallow roast on her fifteenth birthday, and she’d liked it. Several hearts were drawn around the entry for that day. She wrote that someday she and Davis were going to get married. The next entry in the diary was entered the day after her birthday.Can a person die from a broken heart? I will never trust a man again.

My breath caught in my chest, and I could feel the pain and anguish behind that question. Something happened on that day more than eighty years before that had broken Aunt Gracie’s heart. That’s why she went to her room and refused to come out for a whole week.

Jasper’s words came back to me:If she wanted you to know, she would have told you.

I flipped through the page in hopes of finding out why she had written those words, but the rest of the diary was blank. I laid it down on the red bedspread beside the pile of red silk underwear and headed downstairs.

“I’ll probably never know, but whatever happened that next twenty-four hours is what shaped the rest of her life,” I said as I began to make sandwiches for the strawberry crew.

Poor Aunt Gracie had had her heart broken when she was only fifteen years old. She had gone on to live for more than another eight decades, proving that the incident hadn’t killed her like she was afraid it might that day when she wrote in her diary, but it destroyed something in her. I had a feeling it had something to do with Davis, the third friend in the trio, the one who had gone away to war and didn’t come back. Yet she went on after that to be a businesswoman, and a surrogate grandmother to me. I hoped that I had half her strength and determination as I got older.

Chapter Eight

You remembered!” I said when I slung open the front door on Saturday morning.

“Of course I did.” Connor handed me a box from the bakery he’d mentioned. “I promised my new friend muffins for breakfast. My grandpa would take a switch to me if I didn’t deliver what I promised, even if I am thirty-four years old. They’re not from his kitchen; I drove up to San Antonio and got them special for you.”

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