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

  “Very nice, thank you.” Much to Anna’s amazement, her voice didn’t wobble with the fear that her Yankee breath would tarnish the silver. Nor did it hint that she noticed Deb had said Louisa talked about her, rather than Jackson.

  And why would he? They weren’t committed or anything.

  Anna recognized the twitch of his momma’s lips, but her gray steel gaze was silently conducting an inquisition. Anna wanted to blurt her birthday, parents’ and sister’s names, high school and college GPAs, and the situation surrounding her first marriage and divorce.

  Instead, she reminded herself that she had asked to meet this woman, and this would probably be the only time she ever disgraced the house with her Yankee presence. But she had to force a smile. “Is there anything I can do to help with dinner?”

  “Oh, no, dear. You’re our guest.” She picked her knife up and resumed chopping. Efficiently. With a little bit too much verve.

  “Louisa around?” Jackson asked.

  “She’s at Stone’s, but she’ll be back for dinner. Craig and Maura are bringing the girls over. Would you please go hang out the swings? Such a nice day today.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nudged Anna, but an I didn’t excuse you both look from his momma stopped them.

  “Anna, dear,” she said, authority dripping through the Southern in her words, “can I get you something to drink?”

  A muscle in Jackson’s neck visibly tightened.

  Uh-oh. “Oh, no thank you. I’m good.” Anna angled closer to him.

  “I made a pitcher of sweet tea.”

  It was a struggle, but Anna kept her nose from wrinkling.

  She could’ve sworn his momma saw it. The older woman seemed to take particular delight in Anna’s lack of appreciation for the nectar of the Southern gods. “I hope you like stewed okra,” Deb said. “We’re positively swimming in it. Had such a good season last year, we’ll be eating it out of the freezer for months.”

  Anna had gotten divorced and ended up in Confederate Alabama hell.

  “Do sit down,” Jackson’s momma ordered. “Make yourself comfortable. Jackson can handle the swing.”

  “Sure can, but I promised Anna here a trip down the slide.” Jackson’s drawl flared, but not in the comfortable telling-stories-with-Lance-and-Kaci kind of way. Nope, this was his fake redneck act. “Wouldn’t be right gentlemanly of me to not show her a good time.”

  Something shuttered closed in his momma’s eyes, but she aimed a lip smile at Anna. “We’ll chat over dinner.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Anna said.

  Jackson led her out the back door to the massive acres of green lawn, where Radish greeted them both with sloppy dog kisses. Outside, his tension faded until he was back to his easygoing, blood-pressure-free self. He snagged a couple of swings from a shed attached to the house, then led her around to the side of the yard, beyond his momma’s view from the kitchen window, where a gargantuan wooden play fort dominated the ground.

  That slide did look like fun.

  A lot more fun than staying with his momma in the kitchen.

  If she’d had aspirations of being his long-term, permanent girlfriend, she might’ve asked about his relationship with his momma. But she was here as Louisa’s guest for a football game tomorrow, not as the woman Jackson was sleeping with, so she didn’t ask.

  And he didn’t offer.

  But he did show her a good time on the play fort, fully clothed and G-rated and everything.

  “We’re not staying here tonight,” Jackson said while he pushed her on a swing.

  She looked back at him. “No?”

  “Didn’t want the Confederate mausoleum giving you nightmares of General Lee attacking you in your sleep.” He gave her a crooked grin, and soon she was laughing so hard she had to stop the swing.

  Jackson came around to sit on the ground in front of her, that crooked grin getting wider, the orneriness in his eyes lighting his entire face. “Gotta be honest here, Anna Grace. I ain’t been allowed to sleep here since I defected to the Union. Real sticking point in the family. Should’ve warned you. Knew the okra would be thrown down.”

  “Oh, look, he’s smiling,” a female voice suddenly said.

  Anna choked back her laughter. Jackson stayed loose and relaxed. He climbed to his feet and helped her out of the swing. A small family approached. “Friendlies?” Anna said.

  Jackson chuckled. “Yes, ma’am.”

  He seemed happy enough to introduce her to his stepbrother and his family. Craig was tall and lanky, with a plain face and somber manner of speaking, not at all what Anna expected out of a guy who’d once helped Jackson make an airplane motored by his momma’s vacuum engine. Maura was bubbly and pleasantly round, with lips that stretched in a perpetual smile. Their girls were three and one, and they were as much fun as Anna’s nephews had been at that age. While she and Maura and the girls played, Jackson and Craig caught up with hunting and fishing and work stories.

  But soon Deb called everyone to dinner, and they went inside. The smell of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and unfortunately, stewed okra, covered the stifling scents of pride and prestige.

  Louisa had arrived and was waiting at the table. Anna was introduced to Russ, Jackson’s stepfather, and found him to be a somewhat more relaxed version of his son, and surprisingly pleasant given her knowledge that Jackson didn’t care much for him. Obviously a story there.

  None of her business.

  Dinner was accompanied by painfully polite but nonetheless enlightening conversation. Anna hadn’t realized that Jackson’s stepfather was the fourth-generation president and owner of Whipple PeachNuts, the largest chain of tourist-stop peach and pecan stands in the southeast. Every new tidbit about Jackson and his family made Anna’s eyebrows inch up, and every quarter-inch of raised brows on Anna’s part seemed to result in smug satisfaction on Deb’s part.

  Despite the pleasant top conversation, the underlying tensions were choking her. Even the mystery ingredient making the collard greens about the best vegetable Anna had eaten without ketchup in decades couldn’t ease her discomfort, nor did Jackson’s pointedly passing the stewed okra.

  But at least nothing was truly personal for Anna.

  That, apparently, was reserved for the course between dinner and dessert.

  One by one, everyone finished their food. Russ, Deb, Craig, and Maura lined their silverware in the middle of their plates and pushed them back discreetly. Maura settled her older girl’s plate as well, then produced a wet wipe for the baby’s face.

  Jackson left his silverware skewed across his plate, but wasn’t as dismissive of table manners as his sister, who leaned her elbows on the table. At some invisible signal, Craig picked up his and Maura’s plates. Jackson took his and Anna’s.

  “I can—” she started, but stopped herself.

  For the first time since they’d come inside, she caught an amused gleam in Jackson’s eye. “Thank you, Anna Grace.”

  He and Craig disappeared into the kitchen. Deb dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, tucked it back onto her lap, smiled pleasantly, and tilted forward. “Maura, dear, do you remember the Fillmounts?”

  Anna put her hands in her lap and ignored the crick in her shoulders from sitting erect for the last forty-five minutes.

  Maura’s face crinkled, then her omnipresent smile beamed larger. “Oh, yes! That lovely couple from down the street. They gave us the nicest set of matching crystal frames for our wedding.”

  “Mm, that’s them,” Deb said. “They’re getting divorced.”

  Anna shivered against a sudden case of prickles on the back of her neck and knees that reminded her of Riverdancing fire ants.

  “Oh, no,” Maura said.

  “Wasn’t he her second husband?” Louisa said.

  Make that Riverdancing on speed.

  “Mm-hmm. So sad, but of course, not so surprising.” Deb turned that conversational smile to Anna. “She cheated on her first husband too, bless her heart.”

>   Anna made a noncommittal kind of noise.

  “Divorce is so sad, don’t you agree, Anna dear?”

  Something clinked in the kitchen, but it had nothing on the panic crashing through Anna’s core.

  Deb knew.

  She knew Anna was divorced, and she knew her son could do a lot better than a divorced, undereducated Yankee.

  And she wanted to make sure Anna knew it too.

  What Anna wouldn’t have given for her label maker. There wasn’t even anything to straighten in front of her. The stars on the table runner were symmetrically sewn. Anna had left no crumbs to straighten on the tablecloth, and she would’ve bet the freaking grains of wood beneath it were evenly spaced too.

  She tried to match Deb’s pleasant expression, but suspected she looked like the collard greens had given her food poisoning instead. So she tried a lighthearted laugh.

  Which came out about as pleasant as a chicken choking on the carcass of its first cousin. She cleared her throat and went back to the food poisoning look.

  Was divorce sad? Deb certainly had the Southern way of understating things down pat. “Well, of course.” Anna tried the choking chicken sound again and winced. “But really, can you imagine the alternative? That’d be a lot of dead husbands.”

  Too late, she realized she was the only one laughing at her bad joke.

  Deb snatched her water. The intricate diamonds of the crystal goblet cast unsteady prisms on the walls. Russ shot her one of those concerned husband looks, the kind that spoke of history and private stories and understanding of moods and hot buttons.

  Louisa’s face went pale. Her eyes were a blue question mark of hurt, wavering between her mother and Anna.

  Maura gaped at all of them.

  Jackson shot back into the room, somehow managing to make what classified as a breakneck pace for him seem like a casual stroll through a pecan grove. He settled into the seat beside Anna and gave her knee a soft squeeze. “Awful nice of you to let Craig out for the game tomorrow,” he said to Maura.

  Her perpetual smile wobbled. “He’s earned it.”

  Russ cleared his throat. “Heard there’s a petition going around our homeowners’ association to lower the speed limit. You got a homeowners’ association over there in Georgia, Jackson?”

  “Sure do,” Jackson drawled. His thumb brushed Anna’s leg, while his drawl went past comfortable to somebody’s-getting-rednecked. “Had to take down that there Ford I had up on blocks in my front yard. Fines were more’n I paid for the old piece of junk in the first place.”

  The groove between Deb’s eyes grew deeper with every word he spoke. Russ’s jaw tightened.

  Anna struggled for her voice. “Those collard greens are the best I’ve had since I moved down south,” she said. She tried to smile at Deb. “You must have a secret ingredient.”

  “Are you divorced?” Louisa said.

  “Louisa,” Jackson said on a low growl.

  Anna put her hand over his. She was who she was, and her past was what it was. “Yes.”

  Louisa was the only one at the table who seemed surprised. “For real?”

  “Yes.”

  The younger girl’s chin shifted back and forth. “But you don’t have any kids.”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  Anna tensed. Jackson jerked in his seat. Louisa let out a yelp. She glared at him, but he cut her off with a curt, “Enough.”

  “Craig says he got a great spot for tailgating tomorrow,” Maura said. “Getting out after the game should be a cinch.”

  “He always did have luck with parking lots,” Russ said.

  Were they kidding? It was like watching an elephant and a tiger fighting the Civil War right there on the dining room table, and they were talking about parking?

  No wonder Jackson didn’t talk much about his family.

  Louisa got another one of those gleams in her eye. The kind that normal people got when they were about to slip a snowball down their sister’s back in sub-zero temperatures.

  The kind that made Anna wonder—again—if she should’ve declined the invitation to come this weekend.

  “Momma says marry the first time for love, the second time for money.” Louisa’s face shone with a pompous arrogance she was entirely too young to properly manage.

  But, unfortunately, she was entirely rich enough to try anyway, and she was sitting in a chair that probably cost Anna’s monthly salary, and she was implying that Anna was only here because she, too, wanted a chunk of Russ’s wallet.

  The thought sparked a fuse Anna hadn’t realized she possessed. Her temper rocketed into the stratosphere as if it were attached to Neil’s iPod and retainer. Anna savored the flight, narrowing in on her target, burning, building to her climax, and smiled sweetly through the flames spewing from her mouth. “Well, bless her heart.”

  And then everything exploded in a silent, slow-motion shower of embers, burning out the last bits of her anger as they hit the frosty air, as if she were watching the fireworks from far away and hadn’t heard the boom yet.

  Deb’s lip curled. Her breasts rose, shoulders bouncing back. Her hand fluttered to her chest.

  Louisa choked on something akin to a laugh-gasp.

  Maura’s hand flew to her lips.

  Even good ol’ General Lee scowled from his perch of honor in a decorative plate on the wall.

  Russ’s mustache twitched. He discreetly coughed into a napkin. Bless his heart.

  And then the boom hit.

  Her chair jerked out from beneath her.

  It would be a long walk back to Georgia.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  He hadn’t known he was sitting on the fence until he toppled over onto the wrong side, only to discover what was wrong had been right all along.

  —The Temptress of Pecan Lane, by Mae Daniels

  JACKSON COULD COUNT on one finger the number of times he’d been furious with his momma.

  He was still deciding whether he added another finger to that count, but at the moment, his primary mission was getting himself and Anna Grace out of that house.

  He was on his feet hauling Anna out of her seat fast as he could manage, given the way he was choking back a snort of laughter the likes of which this dining room hadn’t seen since before the Yankees won the war. “Great dinner,” he said. “Promised Mamie we’d meet her for bowling, and golly gee, wouldja lookit the time.”

  Momma’s eyes narrowed into slits. “But I made sweet potato pie.”

  “Might could have some for breakfast instead.” He tugged on Anna Grace’s arm to get her to move. She wouldn’t look at him, but he recognized the slump of her shoulders and the tilt of her head. Reminded him of the day he’d first laid eyes on her. Made him angrier than a rabid armadillo that his momma and sister would hurt her. “Night, y’all.”

  Anna’s feet finally moved in the right direction. He let up his grip on her arm and instead steered her by the shoulders through the house and into the cool evening.

  He barely made it down the front steps before he swung her against him. Tears glittered in her eyes.

  “Jackson, I—”

  He sealed his mouth over hers, gripped her waist and hauled her close until they were chest-to-chest, stomach-to-stomach, knee-to-knee. And he kissed her.

  And kissed her.

  And kissed her until she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, her tears touching his cheeks, her hold on him so tight his lungs couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t feel that they needed to, because he didn’t need the oxygen.

  He just needed Anna.

  He kissed the wet trails down her face, threaded his fingers through her soft hair, cradled her close. “Ah, Anna Grace,” he murmured “you are one magnificent woman.”

  She pushed her hair off her forehead with a shaky hand. “I just insulted your mother.”

  Sweet Lord, she had. She’d done it good too. Shouldn’t have been funny, a Yankee insulting his momma in h
er own home, but Momma’d started it, thinking he’d bring home any woman who couldn’t hold her own, Yankee or not.

  Anna Grace, he’d decided, could hold her own with the devil if she had to.

  The laughter welled up inside him again. This time, he didn’t try to hold it back. “Darlin’, you did it right good for a Yankee.”

  “I need to go apologize.”

  “Oh, no, ma’am.” His fingers flexed at her waist. “You go on and let her stew on that for a night. You do whatever you need to in the morning, but tonight, you go on and let her stew.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me on this one.” He cradled her closer. “Besides, we got somewhere better to be.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  And he felt only a mite bad that she probably expected somewhere quiet and alone.

  But when he pulled into the parking lot of Mamie’s favorite bowling alley, Anna Grace looked at him as though he’d sprouted his own Confederate cap. “You were serious.” Her voice broke.

  He almost shifted the truck back into gear.

  But this was the closest he’d get to introducing her to his daddy. “Five minutes,” he said. “You still want to go after five minutes, we’ll go.”

  She looked at the building, then back to him, a silent plea in her eyes.

  “Trust me?” He brushed his thumb over her ear and followed it with a kiss.

  She scrunched her eyes closed, then blew out a sigh. “Five minutes.”

  He checked his watch. “Ready?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  But she climbed out of the truck. He had three minutes and forty-three seconds left when he spotted Mamie’s crew. Took another thirty-three seconds to pass the eight lanes to get to them.

  Miss Dolly saw him first.

  Then she saw Anna. Her eyes went wide, and she tilted her head at Mamie. “You didn’t tell us Jackson was bringing a friend tonight.”

  Mamie’s head popped up from where she was lacing her designer bowling shoes. “You’re late, sugarplum.” She frowned. “What’s this? You make this poor girl go to dinner at that old house? Ophelia, get this poor thing a Coke. You like root beer, sweetie pie? Jackson, what did your momma do?”