Secrets over Sweet Tea (21 page)

Scarlett Jo sidled up beside them, her eyes glistening with tears. “I don’t know two women in the whole world who are better friends than the two of you. I want in on it. Can we be best friends forever?”

“Do we have to?” Rachel asked.

Scarlett Jo punched her with a snort. Rachel rubbed her arm. Grace was certain it would leave a bruise.

“I’ve only known you a few months, Grace,” Scarlett Jo said. “But until this moment I have never seen this kind of light in your eyes.”

“This is the light she used to have,” Rachel added. “Before . . . well, just before.”

“It’s time for it to come back on,” Scarlett Jo said.

Rachel shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, Grace, but listen to her.” She pointed to Scarlett Jo. “Listen to her.”

Scarlett Jo left Landmark Booksellers with a new book under her arm and big hugs from Joel and Carol, the owners. She knew most people didn’t think of her as a reader. They looked at her head of big blonde hair and her other rather looming parts and figured her for a shallow kind of gal. But she’d devour this biography of Steve Jobs in a week, even though it contained more words than one of Sylvia’s tirades.

Scarlett Jo read so much, in fact, that her kids said she needed one of those e-readers. But she liked real live books, the kind with paper and ink—which was why she liked Landmark. They still sold real books, and they always had great recommendations. Plus, they knew her name, and she liked that too. There was just something special about a bookstore that wasn’t one of those chains or on the Internet.

She’d read about a woman in Texas who had a bookstore inside her beauty salon. One minute that woman would be teasing your hair, and the next minute she’d be telling you about the latest Pat Conroy novel. And she sponsored a book club where all the members wore tiaras and animal prints when they got together to talk about books.

Scarlett Jo loved the idea so much that she’d started her own book club last year. She’d even invited Eugenia Quinn, who let her know in no uncertain terms that she didn’t do either tiaras or animal prints. But Eugenia had shown up every week anyway and brought several of her friends. They’d stopped meeting for the summer and had never quite gotten started again, but maybe it was time—

“It’s official! We are going to hell in a handbasket. I’m saying that, and I don’t cuss.”

Scarlett Jo looked up to see Sylvia stalking toward her. “Who’s
we
?”

“Me. You. This world.” The frantic tone in Sylvia’s voice was unusual even for her.

“Now, Sylvia, why don’t you get hold of yourself and sit down. You need to tell me what is going on.” She pulled a wrought-iron chair from under a table in front of the bookstore.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Sylvia tried to scoot past Scarlett Jo.

But Scarlett Jo was fast and broad, and nobody scooted around her. She stopped Sylvia dead in her tracks. “Tell me,” she repeated, her voice calm and kind.

Sylvia’s permanently furrowed brow wrinkled deeper. “I will not. Now get out of my way.”

Well, she had forced her. “Sit!” Scarlett Jo’s words barreled from her chest low and loud.

Poor Sylvia about jumped right out of her patent-leather pumps. But she sat.

Scarlett Jo straightened the hem of her pink floral sundress and pulled it down as she sat across from Sylvia. “Now . . . talk.”

Sylvia set her matching patent-leather handbag on the table in front of her. “It’s my granddaughter. You know, Mary Kate?”

“I know. Keep talking. What about Mary Kate?”

“She’s—she’s gone and gotten herself . . . pregnant.” She barely whispered the word.

Scarlett Jo felt a twinge of heat rise in her face. She tried not to let Sylvia’s ignorance make her too angry. She leaned over and whispered back. “People say that out loud these days. It’s okay.”

Sylvia humphed. “It isn’t okay. We don’t do such things in my family. And she knows better. She’s just sixteen years old, and she’s ruined her entire life, not to mention the whole family’s reputation. And she won’t even marry the boy. Says she doesn’t love him. Well, she should have thought of that before she went out and . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. Apparently she couldn’t form the words.

Scarlett Jo leaned back in her chair. “Well, you’re right. She should have thought first. But she didn’t.”

Sylvia’s eyes narrowed. “People will think she’s white trash.”

Scarlett Jo felt herself twitch. “Yep. And they may think awful things about you too.”

Sylvia’s expression made it clear Scarlett Jo wasn’t helping. “People are nasty. Mean. I mean, her own father’s talking about kicking her out of the house, and he’d have the perfect right.”
She fumbled with her purse. “Never did think much of that man, even if he is my own son-in-law.”

Scarlett Jo crossed her legs and let her foot rhythmically dangle in front of her. “So let me ask you, then, what in the world can you do about it?”

“We can hide it. Send her away.”

Scarlett Jo rolled her eyes. “I guess you could, like they did in the Stone Age—although there is the question of where you’d send her. I don’t think they have homes for unwed mothers anymore. But come on, Sylvia, I’m asking a thoughtful question here. What can you
really
do about it?”

That was when she saw Sylvia’s lip quiver. Or thought she did. But the woman got up so fast it was hard to tell. She snatched her purse and took off past Scarlett Jo’s still-sitting body. “I’ll tell you what I can do, Scarlett Jo Newberry. I can make sure I never tell you anything else again. As liberal as you are, you would probably want to take her in yourself.”

Scarlett Jo stood. “No, I’m thinking that might be what God’s asking you to do. And I think that might be why you’re so angry—because you’re resisting his voice.”

Sylvia turned on her one-inch square heels. “I can’t have that kind of . . .
person
in my home.” And she was gone.

Scarlett Jo couldn’t help but wonder how long it had been since Jesus had been invited into Sylvia Malone’s house either.

Zach’s talks with Jackson the last few weeks had created an awakening of sorts—an awakening to events from his past. The tragedy of his parents’ divorce. The performance-driven personality he had developed and the deep wounds that remained. The
way he and Caroline had entered into marriage, vainly trying to complete one another in ways that left them both undeniably unfulfilled. How they had learned to cope. And how, little by little, they had both shut down their hearts.

“Do you know what I mean when I talk about a shut-down heart?” Jackson had asked him one night as they strolled through downtown Franklin. With the cicadas finally gone, the sweet sounds of a Southern summer had returned.

“Honestly, I don’t think I do.”

“Think about our kids again. You know, like we talked about that first day in my office.”

“I was kind of a wreck that day, remember?”

Jackson clapped him lightly on the back. “How could I forget?”

“So your point was?”

“That our kids didn’t come into this life jaded. They started out with full hearts—fully alive and fully themselves.”

Zach felt a stab of guilt as he thought about Joy and Lacy. They were the ones who suffered most in all of this. And he still wasn’t sure what he could do about it.

“Think about when your girls were little,” Jackson was saying. “They probably danced with this reckless abandon when music would come on. They played dress up and had tea parties or did whatever girls like to do.”

“Well, one of them did. The other is more a soccer-playing tomboy kind of girl. And for the record, they still dance in the kitchen with the music turned up loud—I mean loud.”

Jackson laughed. “My boys came out of the womb making truck noises and wanting to shoot something. And not much has changed with them either. Now it’s airsoft guns and video
games where they’re virtual soldiers. Long way from our BB guns and Swiss Army knives, huh?”

Zach laughed. “Yeah, a whole new world.”

“But my guys still play outside until Scarlett Jo hollers for them to come in. And you know I mean it when I say she hollers.”

Zach pretended shock. “No. Scarlett Jo?”

Jackson chuckled. “I know—right? But my point is, those kids are
alive
. They’re here, present, in the moment. We throw them in the air, and they yell, ‘Do it again, Daddy!’ They cry when you take away their crayons or make them leave a friend’s house. They feel their feelings. They don’t try to be something they’re not.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that,” Zach said. “My girls are trying so hard to be like everyone else. You know—skinny, popular, right clothes.”

“And what are they, thirteen?”

“Just turned fourteen.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. They’re starting to experience what can happen to us when we let life shut us down. We’re meant to stay connected to our hearts, you see. Feeling our feelings, present in the moments we’re given. But we don’t do that. And that’s when we get in trouble.”

“But we’re not supposed to stay kids forever, are we? Shouldn’t we grow up? You know, put away childish things?”

“Of course. We mature and take responsibility for ourselves and others, and that’s a good thing. But we’re never meant to lose that alive quality, to get cut off from our true hearts. Growing up isn’t the same thing as shutting down.”

“But it happens. That’s what you’ve been telling me.”

Jackson nodded. “It does happen, but it’s not inevitable. We
can fight it. We have to fight it. Because when our hearts shut down, we become mere shells of who we once were. We don’t laugh—not honestly, not from the heart. We don’t dream. We don’t feel our feelings or use our gifts. We end up trying to just survive instead of live. It’s like we’ve handed our hearts over to the enemy of our souls and said, ‘Here, you can have it. I’m giving up.’”

He stopped and looked at Zach. “Am I making any sense at all?”

Zach gave a rueful smile. “Too much sense. That’s when we have affairs, right?”

“Not all of us. The thing is, shut-down hearts don’t always look the same. I’ve seen this in my own life and when I’ve walked it out with others. Some people try to control everything in their life. Some fall into pointing out everyone else’s issues instead of dealing with their own. Some try to please everybody, make everyone happy, or play perpetual rescuer. And some people act out sexually.”

“Like me.”

Jackson nodded. “Like you. This thing has a thousand different faces, Zach.”

“That makes sense too, I guess. But it doesn’t really tell me how to get, well, opened up again. I’ve lived this way for a long time, and I don’t have a clue how to be different. Where do you even start when everything around you looks broken?”

Jackson stuck his hands in the pockets of his madras shorts. “Okay, this is the way I see it: you start with the lie.”

“Come again?”

“You have to ask yourself, what is the lie you’ve believed—about life, about yourself, about God?”

Zach considered this as they rounded a corner and started down yet another street. “I don’t know, Jackson,” he finally admitted. “I don’t know what lie I’ve believed.”

“Then that is where you start. Ask him, Zach. Get curious with him. He’s a big God. He can handle your questions.”

“I guess I never thought we could do that. Question God, I mean.”

“Why not?” Jackson said. “Abraham asked God questions and was called a ‘friend of God.’ And Jesus was always asking questions. You ever wondered why?”

“Probably not because he didn’t know the answers.”

Jackson laughed. “No, probably not.” He stopped walking and faced Zach. “I believe it’s because he knew that if he asked questions, we’d start asking questions too—questions about our own hearts. Because that’s what Jesus was always concerned with—people’s hearts. Remember when he talked about adultery? He said if we even look at someone with lust, we’ve committed adultery in our hearts.”

“Well, then—” Zach stuck out his hand—“meet Mr. Perpetual Adulterer.”

Jackson laughed. “It’s in all of us, Zach. That’s part of Jesus’ point, that we all have sin in us. But he was also saying that sin begins and ends with the heart. Actually, that idea runs through the entire Bible. As a man ‘thinks in his heart, so is he.’ ‘Out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.’ In other words, what is in us is going to come out of us. And ‘above all else, guard your heart.’ Do you hear that, Zach? Out of everything we do, protecting our hearts is the most important thing.

“We’ve got to guard them especially from anything that could come in and set up a lie about our God. Anything. I mean,
even doing my work—and I’m a pastor—could convince me that God needs me in some way. That would be the perfect way for the enemy to set me up to wear myself out and shut myself down. And it would all start with a lie. The devil will try to convince us of anything—he’s the father of lies, remember. And that is why we have to guard our hearts so carefully.”