Miss Julia's Gift: A Penguin Special from Viking

Also by Ann B. Ross

Miss Julia to the Rescue

Miss Julia Rocks the Cradle

Miss Julia Renews Her Vows

Miss Julia Delivers the Goods

Miss Julia Paints the Town

Miss Julia Strikes Back

Miss Julia Stands Her Ground

Miss Julia’s School of Beauty

Miss Julia Meets Her Match

Miss Julia Hits the Road

Miss Julia Throws a Wedding

Miss Julia Takes Over

Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind

VIKING

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First published in 2013 by Viking Penguin,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Ann B. Ross, 2013

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ISBN 978-1-101-63369-4

Publisher’s Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Miss Julia’s Gift

I still cringe when I think back to that first year—I’m talking about my
second
first year—the one with Sam Murdoch, not the one with Wesley Lloyd Springer. The less said about that marriage the better, although I’m likely to mention it now and then.

All through that first year with Sam, I simply hadn’t known what to do with him. It had about driven me crazy. I look back now and wonder how he’d put up with me. Oh, I had my excuses and plenty of them, but the main one concerned my other husband, Wesley Lloyd—long dead by then, though briefly mourned. Even so, a twice-married woman can hardly avoid comparing husbands, can she?

I mean, how else can she tell if she’s made a better choice the second time around? I’ve heard of women who keep marrying the same kind of man over and over, and if there was one thing I hadn’t wanted to do, it was to marry another Wesley Lloyd Springer. That was why I’d kept putting Sam off every time he brought up the subject of marriage, delaying and equivocating, afraid that under that warm, sweet, easygoing, live-and-let-live personality of his there lurked a harsh and rigid taskmaster like the one I’d just buried.

Far better, it seemed to me, to live alone in peace than to risk another forty or so years of marital misery if I lived that long. But some women think it’s not living at all unless they have a husband. That hadn’t been my problem. After I got over the shock of finding Wesley Lloyd draped, lifeless, over the steering wheel of his new Buick Park Avenue, I’d felt so liberated as a widow—especially after learning the extent of his estate—that I was not eager to hitch my star to another man, regardless of how well thought of he was by the town and, I admit, by me. Because I’d been tempted, believe me, long before I actually slipped out of town with him to be married in one of those roadside chapels in Gatlinburg.

“Lillian,” I said to my longtime cook, housekeeper, friend, and confidante as I followed her into the kitchen as I’d done many times before and since. This was some few months into that first year of my second marriage. “I declare, I don’t know what to do with Sam. You’ve known him as long as I have, why is he acting this way?”

“He don’t act no different to me,” she said, her eyebrows raised. “What’s he doin’ you don’t like?”

“It’s not that I don’t like it, exactly, it’s just that I keep waiting for the other shoe to fall.”

“Huh,” she said, turning back to the sink. “Too late to be worryin’ about fallin’ shoes now.”

“I can’t help it. I keep waiting for him to turn into another Wesley Lloyd Springer. In fact, I was so fearful of it happening that the only way I could bring myself to marry him in the first place was to do it on the spur of the moment.”

“Yessum, an’ I guess that’s why you didn’t have no church weddin’ like everybody ’spected you to. Ladies all over town was decidin’ what to wear to such a big do, an’ you didn’t give ’em a chance to wear anything.”

I sighed. That had been all I’d heard for weeks after we returned from Gatlinburg. Hazel Marie, Little Lloyd, and, above all, Lillian had done nothing but complain because we’d not had an engagement party, two or three bridal showers (and at my age too!), and a big to-do in church with a reception afterward at the country club. Lillian was most insistent when it came to doing the proper and decent thing, socially speaking, so I had scandalized her by forgoing a church ceremony with a big write-up in the
Abbotsville News
that she could cut out and put in her scrapbook.

“No,” I told her, “the reason we didn’t have a church wedding was because of Pastor Ledbetter. After the grief he gave me over Wesley Lloyd’s estate, which he was convinced should’ve gone to the church with me going to the poorhouse, I didn’t want him marrying us. And it would’ve been a public slap in the face if we’d asked another pastor in town. So we eloped and got it done without all the fanfare of gossip and so on. And if it offended the pastor, well, so be it. He’s offended me often enough.”

“Uh-huh,” Lillian said. “But you wouldn’t even let us have a party for you after it was done. Little Lloyd an’ Latisha didn’t get to throw any rice on you.”

I waved my hand in dismissal. “I don’t want to go back over what we did and didn’t do. It’s done now and I have to live with it. Except I don’t know how.”

“Set down,” Lillian said, unperturbed, “an’ have some coffee.” She put a cup before me, poured one for herself, and we settled at the kitchen table, the place we’d had many a conversation and consultation as she often set me straight in my thinking. “Now, what you don’t know how to do?”

“Live with Sam, that’s what.”

She rared back in her chair, surprised and dismayed. “You mean you tired of him already? Why, Miss Julia, you only been married less ’n a year.”

“Oh, no, I’m not tired of him. In fact, I’m . . .” I stopped, feeling my face redden. I looked away. “Well, truth be told, I’m quite pleased with him. Except I never know what he’ll do next. He keeps surprising me while I keep expecting him to draw up the rules. You know, like when dinner should be on the table, how he likes the newspaper folded, where the thermostat should be set, what time we leave for church, what he likes to eat and what he doesn’t, and so on. Instead,” I went on, taking a deep breath, “Sam acts as if anything I want to do is fine with him, which means I don’t have a clue as to what
he
wants.”

Lillian just sat and stared at me. Finally, she said, “Miss Julia, I guess I better be the one to tell you ’cause you actin’ like you don’t know it, but it’s not Mr. Springer you married to now.”

“Well, I
know
that. My problem is that I don’t know the one I
am
married to.”

Lillian shook her head while her eyes rolled just a little. “Some folks don’t know when they well off.” Then she looked me straight in the eye. “You been knowin’ Mr. Sam for years an’ years. What you mean you don’t know him?”

“Oh, of course I know him when you put it like that. What I mean is I don’t know when he’s going to start acting like a husband and not like he’s still courting. Why, Lillian, every time I turn around he’s bringing flowers or leaving little notes or asking if he can do anything for me or if there’s anything I want, and on and on. And on top of that, here he comes with some little present for every semblance of a holiday that rolls around, including Flag Day when he gave me one of those little glass globes with a mouse inside waving an American flag in a snowstorm. I hate to think what he’ll come up with on Arbor Day. And you remember what he did for Advent. He brought a gift for every blessed day and we Presbyterians don’t even recognize Advent—as a holiday, I mean.” I think I blushed again, recalling some of the intimate wear that Sam had bestowed on me—and during a holy season too, if you can believe it. “It’s disturbing, to say the least.”

Lillian started getting up from the table. “If that’s all you got to worry about, you in pretty good shape. You might not like what he doin’, but they’s one thing you forgettin’. Mr. Sam, he always where he s’posed to be. I got to get supper on.”

That told me she was through with the subject and probably with me. I could tell when she thought I was out of line, whether or not she out and out told me, something she rarely hesitated to do. So I wandered off to the living room to ponder the situation alone.

It was certainly true that, unlike my old husband, my new one was always where he was supposed to be. If he said he was going to Rotary, that’s where he would be. If he said he had an elders’ meeting at church, I never had to check the bulletin to confirm it. Sam was as honest as the day was long. He never gave me reason to suspect him of the kind of duplicity that Wesley Lloyd had practiced—that is, telling me one thing and doing . . . well, I won’t specify exactly what he’d been doing, but it resulted in an illegitmate son who now lived under my roof.

And that was something else that my new husband was doing which my old one would never have tolerated. In fact, Wesley Lloyd would’ve turned me out of house and home if I’d attempted to take in a homeless waif and his unwed mother. But Sam took on my odd and unrelated family as if he’d always been a part of it, and they were delighted with him. So why I was having trouble doing the same, I didn’t know.

Sam was a gifted man in many ways, as a successful small-town lawyer almost has to be. Even though he’d been retired for a few years, his interest in all things legal—well, in all things human, I should say—had never subsided. He was outgoing, friendly, and, above all, courteous. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word.

So different, you understand, from Wesley Lloyd, who’d been the owner of one of the few independent banks in the state and who took pleasure in holding the notes on loans of people who borrowed more than they could repay. “They don’t know money, Julia,” he had once said to me, righteously justifying himself. “Which is their hard luck and my good luck because I do.”

No one would ever have called Wesley Lloyd a gentleman—he’d been much too hard and unbending—although of course he’d had manners and dressed the part. But it was all for show. In his heart he had been a grasping, unfaithful excuse of a husband and of a man.

And if you think that’s too harsh a judgment, you don’t know the half of it. I was brought up to speak no ill of the dead, as well as to say nothing if I couldn’t say something nice, but if I’d followed those old sayings, I would’ve been constrained to utter silence where Wesley Lloyd was concerned for the rest of my life.

Barely two weeks after his funeral—which I must say was well attended since many were worried about certain loans that might be called in by the grieving widow—a knock on my door turned my life upside down.

There had stood a small, blond-headed, bosomy woman—with four-inch heels and five-inch cleavage, both of which shocked me to my core. When I could tear my eyes away from her heavily made-up face, I noticed beside her the little, wispy-haired, freckled-faced boy with glasses sliding down his nose standing there with an ashen look on his face and a Winn-Dixie grocery sack clutched to his chest.

Well, I don’t want to go over all that again. Suffice it to say that I learned then that Wesley Lloyd had been doing more than making loans for some several years—actually for a decade or so, and specifically what he’d been doing every Thursday night that rolled around when I thought he had meetings at the bank. Those two at my door were the result of his extrafinancial activities.

I’d turned the tables on him, though, and on the whole, snickering town while I was at it. I took those two in and dared a soul in Abbotsville to criticize me for it. Hazel Marie and Little Lloyd had become my family—not having been blessed with issue in my first marriage, for which I considered myself doubly blessed after I learned of Wesley Lloyd’s breach of his marital vows.

So that was the family that Sam joined when we were joined in matrimony. And he loved it. He had been a widower much longer than I’d been a widow—said he’d been waiting for me, which I didn’t for a minute believe—and he was lonesome for company. Well, he had plenty of company now—there were Hazel Marie, Little Lloyd, Lillian and Latisha, her little great grand, Mr. Pickens, who was chasing Hazel Marie every chance he got, and me. We were all in and out of the house all day, every day—company enough for any man. Of course, being Sam, he said I was enough for any man, pleasing but also embarrassing me because I knew I wasn’t. Hadn’t Wesley Lloyd Springer proven that?

And wasn’t Little Lloyd the living evidence of it? The child’s paternity, however, was something I rarely thought of after I realized that he might have looked like his father, but he had the sweet soul of his mother. Besides, he really took after me. I was the one he admired and learned from and imitated, and what forlorn and childless widow could resist that?

The fact of the matter was, we’d all learned to get along with each other, and it wasn’t until Sam moved in that our amity was disturbed. Actually, to be honest, it was only
my
inner peace that was shaken as I waited in dread for the signs of a demanding husband—a Wesley Lloyd Springer-type husband—to appear.

But what was I getting? Not a list of house rules, but presents of every type and kind, sweet whispered words, warm holding of hands, loving looks, and warmth in the night.

So, waiting for that other shoe to fall was driving me crazy.

* * *

I gingerly broached the subject to Mildred Allen one afternoon when she’d called me to come over for a visit. We were sitting in her morning room, enjoying the small fire flickering in the fireplace. The pale winter sun shone through a row of windows, making the pastel chintz slipcovers and the rich mahogany tables glow. Ida Lee had brought in a tea service, and we sat sipping from porcelain cups.

I’d always admired Mildred’s fine Georgian house, the grounds of which took up three fourths of a block. My house, the one Wesley Lloyd had built when he decided to take a wife, was on the northeast corner of what was left. Heavy plantings of azaleas, rhododendron, fir trees, hollies, daylilies, and a few dogwoods, as well as one spectacular gingko tree, ran between our houses so that we both had our privacy.

“Mildred,” I said after we’d discussed the latest news that had been passed around at the Lila Mae Harding Sunday-school class. “Mildred, were you ever taken by surprise by something Horace did or didn’t do when you were first married?”

Mildred, who was a sizable woman and always had been, suddenly leaned forward, coughed, sputtered, and grabbed a linen napkin to wipe her eyes as she tried to gain control of herself.

“Julia!” she exclaimed when she could stop laughing. “What are you talking about? Of
course
I was taken by surprise. I was just a girl and didn’t know the first thing about being married.”

Mildred had been quite sheltered as a girl, the apple of her father’s eye and his sole beneficiary as well—thus, the stately house in which she continued to live in well-invested wealth with her kindly, but ineffectual husband, Horace.

“Oh, Mildred, I wasn’t referring to
that
,” I said, nonplused at how she’d jumped to such a conclusion. “I daresay that all of us—those of us of a certain generation, I mean—were somewhat taken aback to learn . . . well, you know. But I’m asking if marriage changed Horace in any way.”