The Potluck Club
Authors: Linda Evans Shepherd and Eva Marie Everson
Tags: #ebook, #book
the
Potluck
Club
A NOVEL
Linda Evans Shepherd
and Eva Marie Everson
© 2005 by Linda Evans Shepherd and Eva Marie Everson
Published by Fleming H. Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepherd, Linda E., 1957–
The potluck club: a novel / by Linda Evans Shepherd and Eva Marie Everson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8007-5984-2 (pbk.)
1. Women—Societies and clubs—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Prayer groups—Fiction. 4. Women cooks—Fiction. 5. Colorado—Fiction. 6. Cookery—Fiction. I. Everson, Eva Marie. II. Title.
PS3619.H456P68 2005
813′.6—dc22 2005006687
The lyrics on page 224 are from “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” words by William Walford (1845) and music by William B. Bradbury (1861).
The lyrics on page 323 are from “This Is My Father’s World,” words by Maltbie Davenport Babcock (1901) and music by Franklin Lawrence Sheppard (1915).
To the woman I called “Grandmother,” a fine lady who knew her way around a Southern kitchen and who taught me much about loving Jesus. I love and miss you!
—Eva Marie Everson
To my wonderful mother, who cooks even better than Lisa Leann Lambert. Also, to the sisterhood of AWSA (Advanced Writers and Speakers Association). I love you, girlfriends. And a special thanks to my dear friend Eva Marie. You and your characters rock!
—Linda Evans Shepherd
Contents
1
Oh, the ladies of the Potluck Club
2 Evangeline—Simmering the Past
3
Does she know she’s infamous.
5
Invader, that’s a good word for her
7
That woman is loyal to a fault
9
No one can call her a cream puff
10 Lisa Leann—Barbecuing the Competition
13
Everyone knows she’s rock solid
17
That’s her, a mother without children
19
Her life will never be the same
20 Lizzie—Savory Family Dinner
21
The town’s most cautious woman—in a speeding car
23
That girl doesn’t embarrass easy
25
She’s got something on her mind
27
Oh, she’s got some stories to tell
29
What secrets doesn’t that girl know
40 Evangeline—Preserved Memories Shared
43
A working woman after all these years
44 Donna—Hashing Out the Meeting
45
She’ll beat you at your own game
46 Evangeline—Spicy Encounters
47
That woman is a legendary kisser
49
That girl is always one step ahead.
52 Lizzie—Trouble Boiling Over
Oh, the ladies
of the Potluck Club . . .
Clay Whitefield sat in his usual spot at the Higher Grounds Café and shook his head as he jotted notes on a clean sheet of his reporter’s notebook. The Potluck Club. This was a group so exclusive, he’d seen country clubs easier to get in to—a group led by a sassy old maid named Evangeline Benson.
Evangeline Benson
, Clay Whitefield thought.
Now there’s a piece
of work . . .
Maybe I should begin by telling you what the Potluck Club is, exactly. More than twenty years ago my dearest and oldest friend in the world, Ruth Ann McDonald, and I started praying together on a regular basis. We’d meet once a month at my house. I’d make coffee, and Ruth Ann would make one of her near-famous coffee cakes. While the aroma of good-to-the-last-drop Maxwell House wafted through the kitchen and into my dining room, Ruth Ann and I sat waiting at my grandmother Miller’s old cherry dining room table, our Bibles spread out before us. I’d read a passage or two—perhaps something the Lord had given me since last we met—and then we would share the issues that needed our prayerful attention.
“I think,” Ruth Ann said at our very first meeting, “that we should begin by praying for Annice Brightman’s daughter, Julie.” She reached for the pad and pen she kept tucked in her Bible’s cover.
I watched her push her large-frame glasses up the bridge of her petite nose before she jotted “Julie B.” on the pad.
“Why? What’s going on with Julie?”
Ruth Ann shook her head sadly, without so much as a “only her hairdresser knows for sure” blond hair moving on her head, then looked back down to the paper and began to retrace the name of the girl who needed our prayer.
“That boy she’s been dating?” I asked.
“That boy she’s been dating.”
This, of course, was the Lord’s confirmation.
I pressed a hand to the dark brown hair I wore pulled back in a French twist. Ruth Ann said that with my thin frame I looked like Audrey Hepburn when I wore it that way, but the truth is, it was easy, and around Colorado’s high country, women are into “easy.” Today I keep it cut short with just a hint of curl. Now people say I look more like Shirley MacLaine when she played in that movie about being the late president’s wife who got kidnapped. I think that’s supposed to be a compliment, but I could be wrong.
“How should we pray, then?” I asked Ruth Ann.
Ruth Ann looked up and raised her brows. “We’ll pray she sees the light.”
And we did. We prayed just as hard as we knew how, but Julie Brightman and Todd Fairfield ended up getting married anyway, bringing into the world a precious child—if there ever was one—Abby, about six months later. Not that I’m gossiping. I mean, after all, that child is nineteen years old now, going to school at the same university where I received my degree in business education on an academic scholarship. (The child, not me.)
Months later Ruth Ann declared we should pray for Janet Martin. “Poor thing,” Ruth Ann said. “She’s got cancer.”
“How do you know so much, Ruth Ann?” I asked her. “Do you stand with your ear to a glass pressed against the world or something?”
Ruth Ann sipped at her coffee before replacing the cup in the saucer. “Very funny, Evangeline. But I’m telling you, I heard it from a reliable source. She was seen in a doctor’s office.”
Well, that much was true. She was seen in a doctor’s office, only it wasn’t because of cancer. It was an extreme case of vanity. In other words, Janet was getting a nose job.
So that’s how the Potluck Club began: two women, a pot of coffee, some coffee cake, and enough misinformation to bring down a church. And it would have too, had it not been for Yvonne Westbrook, the godliest thing you’d ever meet, and I’m not kidding.
Yvonne had been a classmate of Ruth Ann’s and mine, but Ruth Ann and I hadn’t been especially close with her growing up. Then Ruth Ann went off to the Great Lakes with her new husband, and Vonnie and I ended up going to the same college and becoming sorority sisters. While I was studying business management, Vonnie worked toward getting her RN. In our senior year, Vonnie decided to go to Berkeley (I can’t imagine why, but she did), but she didn’t stay long. Before I knew it, I heard she’d gone back to Cherry Creek College to finish school.
After graduation I came back to our sweet little town of Summit View, Colorado (God’s country), and started a home-based tax service, and Vonnie eventually went to work for Doc Billings. Of course, that was before everything around here changed . . . before the “Rushies” moved to town, bringing us out of simple life and into a more modern existence.
I imagine you’d like to know a little more about Summit View, wouldn’t you? Well, know right up front that if anyone in this town has the authority to inform you, it’s me. After all, my daddy was, at one time, the mayor.
Summit View, Colorado—population 25,000—is pretty as a picture when it comes to scenic mountain towns. It was established during the Colorado Gold Rush in 1856, about ten years after the California Gold Rush.
I remember sitting on my grandmother’s front porch, rocking in a rocker, listening to Grandpa telling us the stories he remembered being told himself back when he was a child.
“Back then,” he said, “we had gold mines, all right, but we had some of the best gambling joints and houses of . . .” and then he’d look at me sideways and say, “ill repute.”
“Daddy, why on earth do you say things like that?” my mama implored. “Why encourage her natural curiosity?”
“She’s twelve years old, Minnie. Don’t you think she knows what a house of ill repute is?”
I nodded. “I know what a house of ill repute is, Mama,” I said, though I had no idea. I had to go ask Ruth Ann, who went to her older brother, who told us, giggling, then called us innocents too. I suppose we were, and I suppose that’s not a bad thing. It’s a shame to know your beloved little town used to harbor things like that.
But we also have lost gold mines and stage coach robberies. The stories about those have delighted our children. Not a generation has come and gone but what some pack of kids hasn’t wandered around the hills, looking for lost bags of gold or mother lode never found.
With or without the gold, we have some of the most beautiful mountains, true testaments to the creative hand of God. Summit View is just two hours west of Denver, near Breckenridge. The town sits on Lake Golden, which is actually over an old mining site. And you can see the ski runs in Breckenridge if you stand on a high spot overlooking the lake.