Southern Fried Blues (The Officers' Ex-Wives Club) Read online

Not between Uncle Sam’s sending Jackson TDY and Anna’s class schedule. It was nice of her to stay with Radish once or twice, but he couldn’t deny he’d been jealous of his dog.

  She thought she got enough time with him?

  “I wish I’d had an opportunity to spend some more time with my big sister before she got married and had kids,” Anna said. “It must be nice to have Jackson close by.”

  He blinked in the darkness, and he imagined Louisa was doing the same thing.

  He’d be darned. Anna Grace was playing right back.

  “How old is she?” Louisa asked after a long silence.

  “Five years older.”

  Jackson watched their silhouettes. Looked as if Anna was still wearing his sweatshirt.

  Good.

  “How many kids does she have?” Louisa asked.

  “Three boys.” Anna reached for something. “Wanna see pictures?”

  Louisa scooted closer to Anna.

  He’d never seen pictures of her nephews.

  The two girls put their heads together, and Jackson felt an unfamiliar, uncomfortable swelling beneath his breastbone.

  Anna was good for Louisa.

  “He’s really not into commitment.” Louisa said it so quiet, Jackson almost missed it.

  It was true, but when he saw Anna’s shadow nod, and when he heard her answer, “That works for me,” the swelling in his chest broadened up toward his shoulders and sunk into his gut, making his stomach feel every bit of the marshmallows he’d eaten.

  But twigs snapped and leaves swished near the trail down to the creek, so Jackson took a deep breath to make his lungs squeeze his innards back into their proper places. The campfire didn’t feel warm at all anymore.

  “Girls go to bed?” Lance asked when he and Kaci appeared, hand in hand, happy and content and committed.

  “Yep,” Jackson said.

  “Sugar, we’ll watch the fire if you want to call it a night.”

  He was calling it something, but the right word wasn’t night.

  It was lonely.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He’d always thought fishing was for catching fish, but that was before a woman hooked his heart.

  —The Temptress of Pecan Lane, by Mae Daniels

  SATURDAY DAWNED WITH perfect fishing weather. A little overcast with a breeze rippling the surface of the water. Anna could still smell the breakfast campfire. She’d eaten so many pancakes, they were filling in the space between her ribs.

  She’d been out of bed before Louisa, which had given her the opportunity to use Jackson for nose- and finger-warming.

  Kaci would’ve been proud of her for asking for help.

  Jackson certainly had been.

  But now everyone was up and about, poles in hand, casting on the bank of the creek.

  Jackson slid up next to her. “You want me to bait that hook for you, Anna Grace?”

  She just looked at him. He grinned. “No lizards, but worms are okay, huh?”

  “Worms don’t bleed on my carpet if their tails fall off.”

  He did that amused coughing thing. “Slime and dirt are okay, but no blood. Got it.”

  “We’re camping. And fishing. I’m flexible.”

  “Well, you give a holler if you need some help.”

  If his dimples weren’t so utterly irresistible, she would’ve considered wasting the time by being irritated.

  And if Louisa hadn’t been tapping her foot a few feet down, fishing pole weaving in the air, Anna would’ve considered asking the difference between lake and creek fishing. With so many lakes back home, she’d never had reason to fish in a creek.

  “If she doesn’t want help, I do,” Louisa said.

  Anna’s jaw clenched. She retrieved a can of worms from the tackle box and made her way down the creek in search of the right place to bait her hook and cast.

  The last time she’d been fishing, she was a teenager. But she still remembered how to hook the worms, and it took a practice cast or two, but soon she was comfortable with the rod and reel Lance and Kaci had loaned her.

  They spent most of the morning wandering up and down the creek. The fish weren’t biting. Might’ve had something to do with Kaci and Lance and Jackson’s one-upping each other with more stories of their youth and all the laughter bouncing off the water. Louisa told a few stories of her own, but she couldn’t compete with the three musketeers.

  From its perch in the ocean-blue sky, the sun shone down over the massive oak and pine trees and glinted off the creek waves. Louisa wandered closer to Anna until they had to watch for each other when casting and reeling in. Anna would’ve moved farther, but a rocky outcropping of clay and tree roots blocked her way.

  Jackson was on Louisa’s other side, down far enough to cast without hitting anyone, close enough to rebait Louisa’s hook on demand.

  Louisa’s attitude annoyed Anna, even though she shouldn’t have had an opinion one way or another about how Jackson humored his sister’s helplessness. Just because Louisa was still young enough to have the luxury of time to decide what she wanted to do with her life didn’t make her bad. If Anna could’ve gone back to twenty-one, she would’ve done a few things differently. Not married Neil. Experimented with classes in other degree programs to make sure chemistry was her true love.

  Most days she was happy enough with her goals, but the schedule was a drag sometimes. Especially during some of the more boring lectures.

  Anna cast with a frustrated grunt and turned her reel.

  According to Louisa, all college lectures were boring. So maybe Anna’s problem wasn’t jealousy. Maybe it was simply that Louisa had a bad attitude that Jackson kept humoring.

  If he wanted to treat his sister like a spoiled princess, that was his business. They weren’t in a real relationship. She had no right to care.

  Something tugged at her line.

  Anna snapped to attention. She adjusted the reel. Tension bent the tip of her pole.

  “Got something there?” Jackson asked.

  “Think so.” Anna kept reeling. Whatever she’d hooked was putting up a massive fight. “Feels like a nice one.”

  Louisa backed away and gave her room.

  “You go, sugar,” Kaci said. “Bring him in.”

  The fish thrashed to the surface. Anna laughed. “Got you now.” It pulled and tugged, but Anna held steady, and soon she dangled the fish out of the water. Its sleek silver body curved in a C when it wasn’t making its last-ditch efforts to escape.

  “Hang on, big guy.” Anna reached for it, but bumped hands with Jackson. Ornery man. “I’ve got it.”

  “Gonna take forever to get that fish stink off your hands,” Jackson said. He batted her hands away with a calculated twinkle in his eyes. “Besides, he might bleed. I got this one for you. He’ll be good all fried up for dinner.”

  Anna swung the pole so the fish was out of reach. “Catch and release. We’ve got food for dinner.”

  Jackson hooked the edge of her pole and swung it back. “No fun in that.”

  The fish flopped and twisted on the end of the line, gills flaring, eyes big and fishlike. Creek water flung off it.

  “Catch and release,” Anna insisted. “Would you let go? I’ve got this.”

  She tugged the pole again, and the fish swung wide.

  Right into Louisa’s face.

  She ducked too late. “Oh, gross! Get it off! Get it away! Gross gross gross! Ew!” She scrubbed at her face, shrieking.

  “Ohmigod!” Anna gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

  Jackson’s eyes flared wide. “Okay, Lou-Lou?”

  Anna floundered to snatch the fish. She unhooked him and tossed him back. Kaci and Lance trotted over.

  Louisa was in the midst of a fit that would’ve made Kaci’s momma proud. “How could you do that?” she wailed. “A fish touched me. On my face. Ew, ew, ew!”

  “Gonna live, Lou-Lou,” Jackson said. He pulled off his T-shirt and handed it to her.

  She swiped it ov
er her fish-slime-infested skin. “God, I can’t smell anything but fish.” She gave Anna the stink-eye. “This is why you let the menfolk do man-things. So we ladies don’t get smacked in the face with a fish.”

  Anna’s face burned, but worse, her chest felt as if it had been rolled in fishing line and was now being tugged tighter and tighter, as if she were the one dangling naked on a hook for all her friends to see.

  She hadn’t done anything wrong. Not on purpose.

  A roar of displeasure erupted in her veins, and she felt her nose flare. “You’ll go hunting. You’ll shoot an animal. But you can’t touch a fish?”

  Louisa channeled an air of Southern belle outrage even while scrubbing her nostrils. “Touching’s for boys.”

  The line around Anna’s chest squeezed tighter, cutting into her breathing space. She quaked with an energy she hadn’t expected and didn’t understand. “Seriously?”

  “And dead squirrels and deer don’t smack me right in the kisser like Moby Fish.”

  Anna’s jaw ached. “It’s just river water.”

  “It’s just gross, and I shouldn’t have to touch dead things.”

  “Sugar, down here, our mommas teach us the value of being helpless sometimes,” Kaci said to Anna.

  “Sometimes.” Anna gripped the handle of the fishing pole so hard, she was probably leaving dents in the hard plastic. “When does sometimes turn into a complete inability to take responsibility for yourself and your actions? When does sometimes cripple your chances at being able to hold a real job and pay your own bills and survive on your own?”

  Louisa’s eyes snapped. “Honey, that’s why we go fishing for men.”

  Jackson stepped between them, wariness and something else Anna had never seen darkening his eyes. “Pipe down, Louisa. Think you’re gonna make it.”

  “I—”

  Kaci cut her off. “Anna, sugar, I’m pickled out with this fishing stuff. You got a book I could borrow?”

  But Anna wasn’t looking at her. She was too busy having a staring contest with Jackson, and she didn’t like the quit picking on my sister message.

  Sure, she would’ve expected the same from Beth, but Anna wasn’t the spoiled rotten brat Louisa was.

  Jackson’s eyebrows knit closer together. You better quit talking now came silently from his pursed lips, like he didn’t appreciate her assessment of his sister.

  “It is what men are for,” Louisa said. “Russ won’t give me a job, so I’ll just get married and have babies and let my husband take care of me. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what Momma did and what her momma did before her, and it’s what I’ll do.”

  Anna’s heart ached. It ached for Louisa’s ignorance, it ached for the wedge splintering her good thing with Jackson, but mostly, it ached for herself. “Yeah, works great, right up until it’s over.”

  Kaci tugged Anna’s arm, and this time, Anna looked away from Jackson.

  “She’s young, sugar,” Kaci said. She steered Anna back to the campsite. “Give her time.”

  “Won’t matter if he leaves me in a ditch with six babies,” Louisa called. “Russ and Jackson will take care of me.”

  Anna wrenched herself out of Kaci’s grasp and spun back toward Louisa. “And forty years from now, do you want to be the person Russ and Jackson took care of, or do you want to be the person who left a mark on the world?”

  “That’s enough.” The quiet warning in Jackson’s voice sent a chill down Anna’s spine. His eyes had gone completely dark, his disapproval directed square at her. The only message she got now was get the hell out of my business.

  Her eyes stung. “Apparently not. You’re not doing her any favors, you know.”

  Anna wasn’t doing herself any favors either.

  IT TOOK LOUISA near about three-point-two minutes to quit her hollering once Anna and Kaci were out of earshot. Lance had apparently gotten a boost of intelligence through getting hitched, because he’d tucked tail and followed the women.

  Once Louisa finished with her say, she returned Jackson’s shirt and grabbed her fishing pole.

  Which meant it was time for Jackson to do something he wished he’d been smart enough to do over the summer.

  He blocked her rod so she couldn’t cast. “I won’t,” he said.

  She channeled Momma’s favorite disapproving blink. One long, two short, followed by another pointed long. “You won’t what?”

  He had to swallow to get the words halfway out his mouth, because it went against everything his daddy had ever taught him, but he had to say it. “I won’t take care of you.”

  Her lips parted. Her left eyebrow crinkled in the center. “What did you say?”

  “I won’t take care of you,” he repeated. He felt like his lungs had turned into glaciers, freezing the air inside him, inching outward, crushing his other organs, but he channeled one of his own favorite parental expressions, the one his daddy had always used whenever Jackson disappointed him. “Only person in this world responsible for you is you. You want to fall back on Russ, you go right ahead. But until you start trying to make your life better for you, until you start taking school seriously and looking for a job, don’t expect me to come around and pick up the pieces.”

  Her mouth formed a perfect O. Her shoulders went back, and she tried to do that fourteen-feet-tall thing Anna Grace had mastered. Jackson widened his stance and narrowed his eyes.

  She faltered. “Yeah, well, it’s easy for you.” She poked him in the chest, right on his tiger paw. “You had Daddy.”

  His blood roared. He clenched his teeth against it. Yeah, he’d had Daddy. But Louisa hadn’t been lacking in support. Killed him to admit it, what with all that Russ and Momma would’ve put Daddy through if he hadn’t been in that accident, but Russ had made sure Louisa didn’t want for anything. And it killed Jackson to admit maybe Momma had done something Anna Grace would’ve scoffed at—she’d gotten married to take care of her family when Daddy wasn’t there to provide anymore.

  “Life’s what you make of it,” Jackson said. “What it looks like here, you’re making a mess of yours. Nobody to blame but yourself. You want to be a grown-up, we’ll hang out. You want to be a baby, go on home and get yourself a nursemaid.”

  Tarnation. Not the tears.

  And the chin wobble.

  Jackson yanked his T-shirt back on. He hated when girls cried.

  Hated it worse when he made them, but he was pretty good at avoiding that.

  Usually.

  “You’ve never liked me,” Louisa said.

  Jackson blew out a sigh. He’d asked for this. “That’s not true.”

  “Then why didn’t you ever come home?”

  He regarded her suspiciously. He felt like a worthless yahoo for making her cry, but she’d had a lot of years to perfect the poor me act. He was a sucker for believing the trembling lip and big old teardrops, but she was the only sister he’d ever have. “Wasn’t about you.”

  “And you always stay with Mamie and then rub it in my face that she likes you better than me.”

  She’d crossed the line there. Mamie didn’t play favorites.

  But he hadn’t heard tell of many times she’d taken Louisa out bowling with her like she’d done when Jackson was little.

  “Momma and Russ did Daddy wrong, but y’all took it out on me,” Louisa said. She sniffled. “And now you’re back home, but you’re spending all your time with Anna. I could’ve been with Stone all weekend, but instead, I’m here. Maybe I wanted to go camping with you all by yourself. You ever think of that, you big lug-head?”

  Considering Jackson knew good and well she didn’t like hunting, camping hadn’t crossed his mind as an activity she would’ve liked for much more than the marshmallows and the chance to make Jackson miserable. “Too far, Lou-Lou,” he warned.

  She shrugged. “Worth a try. You’re being mean.”

  “Not mean to tell you what you need to hear,” he said, but he had to force it, because he didn’t want to hurt her. Didn�
��t like feeling like an old man either. “Time I was your age, I had a job lined up and I was putting everything I had into doing my best every day. Like Daddy taught me to.”

  “Daddy raised you better than to go to Alabama.”

  “Daddy raised me better than to let you grow up worthless.”

  Louisa’s eyes started their heavenward supplication, but Jackson nudged her foot. “You’re not worthless,” he said. “But you’re working on it. Gotta pull yourself together, Louisa. Get your grades up. Work at something for once.”

  “You’re a jerk,” she said.

  And then she spun and was gone, headed away from him, away from camp, and away from the creek.

  Well, tarnation again.

  He was working on being useless himself.

  Not much a man could do after that but sit himself right back down and wait for it all to blow over.

  Took two hours. Two long hours of sitting with his dog, flinging a halfhearted line into the creek, debating with himself over the wisdom of going to talk to Anna, but eventually Louisa showed back up, looking for all the world like nothing was wrong. “I’m hungry,” she said, “so I’m gonna go up to camp and get myself some food.”

  Still felt like dangerous territory there, but he went with her.

  And when they returned to camp, Jackson realized he had another problem.

  “Is that a label on the fire pit?” Louisa asked.

  Kaci and Lance were polishing off some cold fried chicken at the picnic table. From what Jackson could tell, the only thing not labeled were their foreheads. Anna was nowhere in sight.

  “Plum tuckered herself out.” Kaci nodded at the tent. She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “Strained her thumb doing all that typing, then her label maker overheated. Good thing it was her spare.”

  “Weirdo,” Louisa said.

  Jackson glowered at her. She stumbled back a step. “Um, lunch. I’m hungry.”

  “Might want to take yours back down to the creek,” Lance said to Jackson. He seemed to only half-imply that Jackson might get some make-up nookie. The other half warned he might want to dig out some Kevlar instead.

  “Yep, you go on,” Kaci said. “We’ll keep a good eye on baby sister here.”