The Banty House Read online

  Kate finally won the last round of the evening. “Aha,” she said, “the ivories didn’t totally forsake me.”

  Sloan covered a yawn with his hand. “Thanks for the evening and for the food, ladies. I’ll be here soon as the dew dries tomorrow to mow the lawn and spruce up the flower beds.”

  “I need you to take half a dozen jars of jam to Joy Goodman over in Hondo right after lunch. She’s havin’ some kind of fancy whoop-de-do with her book club and wants to give them away as door prizes,” Betsy said.

  “Sure thing.” Sloan tipped his cap toward them and started for the door. “Want to walk me out, Ginger? You didn’t get your evening stroll. It’ll just be across the yard to my truck, but you can get a nice breath of fresh air.”

  “I should stay and help Betsy clean up.” She glanced around at the dirty plates.

  “I’ll help her,” Connie said. “You kids go on. It’s a lovely night to sit on the porch swing.”

  “Are you sure?” Ginger asked. “I was gone part of the afternoon already today.”

  “You’ll make it up later. We don’t punch a time clock around here. If we did, you would have already been working overtime, since you played dominoes with us all evening.”

  Ginger grabbed a hooded sweatshirt from the coatrack in the foyer and slipped it on before she went outside with Sloan. He waited until she was settled on the swing and then sat down beside her.

  “I’d never heard that story about the way the brothel was run,” he said. “Granny always said that Belle Carson had good business sense and knew when to shut the place down.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought she’d tell her daughters all about it,” Ginger said.

  “Maybe she was hoping they’d understand why she did what she did, or maybe she was trying to help them realize if times got really tough again after she was dead, they could always get creative in ways to make money.” Sloan kept the swing going with his foot.

  “I want to be that honest with my daughter,” Ginger said. “I want to be a mama like theirs was.”

  “She must’ve been one special lady,” Sloan said. “But then so are you.”

  “I don’t know about that, but I sure intend to try.” Ginger sucked in a lungful of fresh air. “I smell honeysuckle.”

  “It’s blooming on fences everywhere around here,” Sloan said. “The wind is bringing the scent right to you.”

  “I’m worried, Sloan,” she whispered.

  “About what?”

  “Leaving,” she admitted. “I’ve only been here a week and a day. Walking away would break my heart. I’ve never had friends like you and the sisters.”

  “It’s sure something to think about.” He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I really should be going. It smells like we might be in for more rain, and I left my truck windows down.”

  “Have a good rest of the night.” The touch of his lips on her skin sent tingles dancing down her spine.

  She sat on the swing and watched him cross the yard and get into his truck, continuing to keep an eye on the red taillights until they disappeared into the darkness, and then she touched her forehead to see if it was as hot as it felt.

  Finally, she placed a hand on her stomach and said, “Baby girl, how about the name Belle. Does that suit you?”

  The baby kicked her hand hard enough that Ginger giggled. “I’m not sure if that was a yes or a no, but you sure had an opinion about it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  On Saturday morning the sun came out, bringing heat and humidity with it. Betsy said the weather was like sending her flower beds to a spa all day. Sloan showed up right after breakfast, made a trip into Hondo to deliver jam to Joy Goodman, and then worked in the garden most of the morning. In the afternoon, Connie claimed Sloan and Ginger to help deep clean the two spare bedrooms.

  “This is Mama’s room,” Connie explained as she opened the door. “I clean it every spring from top to bottom. I come in here and sit in her rockin’ chair when I’m having a hard day, and after a few minutes, everything is peaceful inside my heart again.”

  “I’m not against anything that brings about peace. I’ll get the bed dismantled and put out in the hallway,” Sloan said.

  Ginger had thought they’d wash the baseboards and clean any dust that might have collected off the ceiling fan. Evidently, Connie’s idea of deep cleaning and hers were two very different notions.

  “And then the dresser and the rest of the furniture. Mama hated spiders, so we’ll be sure there’s not even a teensy one hiding anywhere in her room.” Connie went to work cleaning off every flat surface. “Ginger, you can clean off the top of her dresser. Just lay whatever is there in the drawers. It’s on casters, so it won’t be hard for Sloan to push out of the room,” Connie said.

  While Sloan took all the covers from the bed and tossed them into a pile out in the hallway, then started tearing down the four-poster bed, Ginger opened a drawer to find nightgowns and underwear still folded neatly in it. Pictures of all sizes, some in black and white, a few in color, gave testimony that Belle’s girls had been her life. Ginger had already put her ultrasound picture of the baby into her album, but someday she was going to have pictures of her family scattered about like this—and like what she’d seen in Sloan’s house. History was something a child could hang on to, could talk about. Sloan could say that his granny told him this or that. The Carson sisters knew all about their mother and their grandparents and could remember their sayings. Ginger had none of that, but by golly, her child was going to at least have a mother who’d provide her with memories.

  She looked down at the neatly folded white silk underpants in the drawer where she’d laid several framed photos. “How long has your mother been gone, Connie?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Connie held up her fingers. “I guess it must be sixty years this summer. Kate was twenty the year she died and she’s eighty now.” She carried knickknacks from the nightstands and the table beside the rocking chair out into the hallway and lined them up against the far wall. “We had good intentions of giving all her things away when she’d been gone a year, but we just couldn’t do it. Then one year turned into two and then it was ten years, and we decided having her room as it was when she was with us brought us comfort. We had a little family meeting and decided that we’d probably never use the room anyway, so I just clean it every year and we leave it alone.” She raised her voice as she carried another armload of things out into the hallway. “Besides, when I clean, it brings back good times.”

  “Such as?” Sloan carried out the rocking chair.

  “I bought her this little ceramic bunny for Mother’s Day the year before she died. Since Easter was her favorite holiday, we often bought her little gifts that would remind her of that day. I can still see her face when she opened her present.” Connie smiled.

  “Granny liked Thanksgiving, so there’s still a whole collection of little turkeys in her bedroom,” Sloan said.

  “Your grandmother’s name was Martha Jane, right?” Ginger remembered the tombstone he’d been sitting in front of that evening.

  “Yep.” He nodded.

  Martha Belle, she thought. That would be a good solid name for my daughter.

  Sloan’s muscles strained the sleeves of his T-shirt as he moved the dresser from the room. The old wooden casters hardly worked at all anymore, so finally he just picked it up and carried it out of the room. Lucas had needed the help of all three of his friends just to move a flat-screen television up two flights of stairs. Granted, all four of them combined wouldn’t have a single bulging muscle like Sloan.

  You shouldn’t compare people. Everyone has weaknesses and strengths. A school lesson on judging came back to haunt her as she stood in the middle of a totally empty room.

  “All right, now we wash the walls,” Connie said. “Sloan, will you go in the bathroom and fill the bucket with warm water? Well, rats! I forgot to get the bucket and the spray to take the dark spots off the walls. I’ll be right
back.” She headed out the door.

  “I can get those for you,” Sloan said.

  “It’d take more time to tell you what I want than to just go get it myself. I’ll pick up three bottles of water while I’m in the kitchen,” Connie said.

  “Are you really okay with washing ceilings and doin’ this kind of work?” Ginger asked him when Connie was out of hearing distance.

  “It all pays the same, but I’d do it for free,” he answered. “And besides, none of the sisters should be on a ladder at their age. If they fall, they could break a hip or an arm. They’ve been so good to me my whole life that it would break my heart if one of them got hurt doing something that I could’ve done for them.”

  Lucas had never helped with one thing in the apartment. His theory was that men didn’t do housework of any kind. They didn’t even pick up their dirty dishes and cups and take them to the kitchen sink. He wouldn’t even have understood why a person might wash walls.

  Stop comparing, that pesky voice in her head reminded her again.

  She couldn’t help it. Lucas was the male in her past life. Sloan was the one in her present. They held different roles. Lucas had been her escape from the shelter. Sloan was her friend. Maybe what she was experiencing was what she’d heard called pregnancy brain, but lately it seemed like she was analyzing every little emotion and event that came into her life.

  “Here’s what we need.” Connie brought a blue plastic bucket into the room and began to unload it. “Water and some cookies in case we need a snack, cleaner to put in the water, and some stronger stuff to spray on the walls.”

  “What do I do?” Ginger pulled a rubber band from the pocket of her jeans and twisted her hair up into a ponytail.

  “You are going to wash the middle third of the walls. I’ll do the bottom third, and Sloan will do what we couldn’t get when he gets finished.” Connie tied a bandanna around her head and knotted it in the middle of her forehead. If she’d put on the same red lipstick she’d worn to the hairdresser, she’d have looked a lot like Lucille Ball.

  “Your walls are papered instead of painted,” Ginger commented. “How do you wash them?”

  “I have them repapered every fifth year and dust them well every spring in the years in between,” Connie said. “This little job will be done in an hour. We probably wouldn’t need to do them every year, but I like to keep Mama’s room all fresh and pretty.”

  Sloan set up the ladder, finished the ceiling and the fan, and then got down and started helping the ladies with the walls. “Was that fan put in before y’all had the air conditioners installed?”

  “Yes, it was,” Connie said. “Mama still had girls when she had the fans put in each room. It could get pretty warm in the summer without them. We didn’t get air-conditioning until several years after Mama died, so she never got to see how wonderful it is.”

  Just as they finished putting the room back to rights that evening, Betsy yelled that supper would be on the table in fifteen minutes. Connie stopped at the dresser and eyed the pictures that Ginger had set up again on the top, and then she took an old Polaroid picture from her pocket and cocked her head to one side. Then she switched two of the small frames and moved one on the end slightly to the left.

  “You did good remembering which ones went where, but . . .” Connie patted Ginger on the shoulder. “Now it’s just like Mama had it fixed.” She picked up the bucket and headed downstairs, leaving Sloan and Ginger alone.

  “No spiders, no dust, and everything in its right place.” Sloan turned out the light and ushered Ginger out with a hand on her lower back. There were those same sparks that she’d felt when he kissed her forehead.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a clean house,” Ginger said.

  “‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,’” Sloan quoted Scripture. “That’s what Granny always quoted on cleaning day.”

  “Speaking of that, why don’t you go to church with us tomorrow?”

  “I told you that me and God got some things to sort out before . . . ,” he started, but she put her finger over his lips.

  “God might meet you in the middle if you show Him you’re serious about doin’ that heart cleanin’. Maybe He don’t like spiders and dust, either. And all you’re doin’ is lettin’ your heart gather up dirt and varmints,” Ginger said.

  “So you are religious?” Sloan said.

  “As I told you before, I’m not religious, but I have faith,” she replied. “I think there’s a difference, but I haven’t quite got it put into words yet. I like going to church, even though my mind wanders from the sermon sometimes. I love the singing, so when I go, I pay attention to the words of the hymns. It didn’t matter which church I went to when I was off work on Sunday, just so long as I could hear the songs.”

  “Did you ever sing all by yourself in the empty church?” he asked.

  “Nah, I don’t have much of a voice for singin’,” she said when they reached the bottom of the steps. “We should’ve washed up for supper while we were upstairs.”

  Betsy poked her head around the dining room door. “It’s all right if you wash up in the kitchen sink. Ain’t no need to make another trip up the steps.”

  “So?” Ginger looked up into his face.

  “So what?” Betsy asked.

  “I asked him to go to church with us tomorrow mornin’. There’s room on the pew where y’all sit for him, isn’t there?” Ginger asked.

  “Of course, and you know you’re welcome anytime.” Betsy smiled. “But you don’t have to decide right now. Just show up and then come to Sunday dinner with us afterwards. Right now you kids need to wash your hands. Supper is on the table, and I know you’re hungry after all that work that Connie made you do. Downright crazy to tear a room to pieces like that, if you ask me, but did anyone ask me? Oh, no!” She muttered all the way back to the kitchen.

  When they were gathered around the table, sitting in their normal spots, Connie said a short prayer, and then Betsy ladled up homemade chicken noodle soup in all their bowls. Kate passed a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches that had been cut diagonally around the table and then a relish tray.

  “Save room for strawberry shortcakes,” Betsy said. “I had too many berries for the batch of jam I made today, so I whipped up a sponge cake to use for the bottom layer.”

  “There goes my idea for taking all you ladies up to the snow cone stand this evening,” Sloan said. “We’ll all be too full for that.”

  “Can we have a rain check and go after dinner tomorrow?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Sloan said. “If I go to church with y’all, would you let me drive you into Hondo and take y’all out to Sunday dinner? You’ve been so good to feed me extra meals this week, and I’d sure like to repay you.”

  “If . . . ,” Kate said, “you promise to sit with us tomorrow, we would be honored to go to that pizza place in Hondo that has a big buffet dinner, and you can drive for us.”

  What changed his mind about church? Ginger wondered. Could it be that he was finally realizing a terrorist had killed his friends, and that neither he, nor God, could have stopped it from happening?

  “Why that place? We could go to a nice steak house,” Sloan asked.

  “Because Betsy can’t make pizza worth eating,” Connie answered. “Anything else she can cook for us right here. Pizza is a treat.”

  “I’ve been craving pizza ever since I got pregnant,” Ginger said when she felt all their eyes on her. “I’ve never tried to make it myself, but I sure do love it.”

  “Okay, then.” Sloan nodded. “I’ll be here at a quarter to eleven to drive you ladies to church.”

  Ginger wondered what the folks who were already spreading gossip would make of them all arriving together. Lord have mercy! If she and Sloan even sat beside each other, the cell towers between Rooster and Hondo might flat-out explode.

  Chapter Twelve

  Ginger tried to concentrate on the short shopping list she’d made, bu
t it was nearly an impossibility with Sloan sitting right next to her on the church pew. His shaving lotion—something woodsy and wonderful smelling—wafted over to her every time he moved even the slightest bit. With a sigh she forced herself to look straight ahead and not at him. That didn’t last more than a minute, and she went back to stealing sideways glances at him. To everyone else, it looked like he was paying attention to the preacher’s words, but he didn’t fool Ginger one bit. His mind was wandering just like hers—only she’d bet that he wasn’t thinking about her like she was him.

  She forced herself to make a mental shopping list for when they went back to Hondo. She needed a dress that she could wear now, but also after the baby came—maybe one of those new little knit numbers that skimmed the knees. She had one suitable outfit for church other than her Easter dress from last week. If she was going to attend every week, she should have at least four so that she wouldn’t wear the same thing all the time. She also wanted to get a cell phone. It didn’t have to be fancy and have all the smart features on it, but it did need to be better than the one that she had to pay to add minutes to.

  Then she should probably get a few things for the baby. If she spit up like that little guy did in her last foster home, it would take several gowns or outfits each day. Thank goodness there was a washer and dryer at the Banty House.

  That worked for maybe three or four minutes, and then she went right back to thinking about Sloan. He sat so close to her that light couldn’t make its way between their bodies. He’d dressed in starched jeans, a blue plaid shirt the color of his eyes, and tan cowboy boots that morning. Ginger had visions of women gathering around him like flies on an open sugar bowl as soon as services were over.

  Did other people have wandering thoughts like she did? She glanced to her left, where Kate sat at the end of the pew. Was she thinking about loving her neighbor, or was she figuring out how to make adjustments to her recipe for blackberry moonshine? Connie was next in the lineup. While Ginger was watching, she removed a tissue from her purse and dusted the tops of the hymnals. Betsy’s expression left no doubt that she wasn’t hearing a word the preacher was saying, and Ginger would have bet dollars to doughnuts that she was devising a new way to make her pizza as good as what they’d eat after church.