The Scent of Lilacs (13 page)

Zella looked up from her typewriter when they got to the
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a little after nine. “Oh, you’re here. I thought perhaps you’d taken the day off even though it wasn’t written in on your calendar.” She swiveled her chair around to face David and Jocie. With her index finger she pushed her green-rimmed glasses up on her nose and then lightly touched her dyed-black hair to make sure each round curl was still in place. David had never seen her with a hair ruffled even on the windiest days. Jocie said Zella’s hair would break before it would blow out of place.

“Now, Zella, you know I wouldn’t not let you know if I wasn’t coming in. I’m sorry. I guess I should have called to let you know we were running late.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I’m sure you had more important things to worry about than whether the people at your workplace knew where you were. After all, it hardly matters if I have to tell the mayor you’re not here and I have no idea whether you will be or not.”

Jocie rolled her eyes at David. “Yikes, Zella. What did you eat for breakfast? Prunes?” Without waiting for an answer, Jocie opened the door to the pressroom. The sound of the machinery spilled out. She was yelling to Wes about Tabitha before the door closed.

“So the mayor called. Did he want anything special or just some free advertising for his next political campaign?”

“The election is not until next spring,” Zella said.

“It’s always election time with the mayor.”

“True enough,” Zella conceded. “But he says he wants to get with you about the community having a Fourth of July celebration. He says he thinks it’s especially important this year after the tragic events of the fall, and I couldn’t agree with him more. I still get tears in my eyes every time I think about little John-John saluting his father’s coffin. Such a tragedy.” She fished a tissue out of her skirt’s waistband and dabbed her eyes. “What is the world coming to when they’ll shoot down wonderful men like President Kennedy?”

“I don’t know, Zella.” He wished he was in the back with Wes and Jocie talking about Tabitha coming home. Not that he didn’t agree with Zella about the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination. He did. But Zella wallowed in her grief, enjoying it as much as a pig loves mud.

“But as a preacher, what do you think, David? Do you think we’re in the latter days with rumors of war and storms and upheavals all around?”

“The Bible is pretty clear on that, Zella. It says no one can know, so I don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out God’s plans.”

“But they have those bombs that could wipe us out in a millisecond and those red phones and everything. It’s scary when you think about it. I thought about having one of those bomb shelters built in my backyard, but I couldn’t see tearing up my rose garden. My mother planted some of those rosebushes, you know. Besides, who wants to be all squirreled up under the ground while everything is dying above you? Better to go first and quick, I say.” Zella bobbed her head up and down. Her curls didn’t bounce out of place.

“You could be right,” David agreed. “We just have to keep praying for peace.”

“Well, of course, that goes without saying.”

“Any other messages besides the mayor’s?” David said as he edged past Zella’s desk. Zella could talk nonstop for hours about the world going to the dogs, but she had no trouble jumping back to the business at hand.

“Just Harry Sanders. He called to say he had his paint on sale this week if you still needed some.”

“Did you talk him into putting a sale ad in the paper?”

“Of course.”

“You’re worth your weight in gold,” David said.

“A man doesn’t advertise, he goes broke.” Zella turned back to her typewriter to hide her pleased smile.

“And a paper that doesn’t sell ads goes broke even faster.” David was to the door to his small office. “Oh, by the way, I’ve got news. Good news.”

Zella looked up at him again. “The church voted you in? Well, that’s wonderful. Of course, they should have.”

“That too,” David said. “But more. Tabitha came home.”

Zella frowned, at a loss, until it dawned on her what Tabitha he was talking about. Her eyes flew open wide. “Your Tabitha?”

“Yes, my Tabitha.”

“Oh my heavens, David. That’s fantastic news.” Zella stood
up but didn’t seem to know what to do next. “Is she okay? What about Adrienne? And my gracious, why didn’t you tell me the minute you got here? This is so exciting.”

“She’s fine, Zella, and Adrienne’s still in California.”

“California suits her.” Zella sat back down, her smile disappearing.

“How do you know? Have you ever been to California?”

“No, but Wesley has, and you see how he is.” Zella rolled a fresh piece of paper into her typewriter. “You really shouldn’t let him tell Jocelyn all those crazy stories about being from Jupiter. She half believes him.”

“Oh, they’re just having fun. Nothing to worry about.”

“Wesley’s something to worry about. Has he ever told you why he’s hiding out here in Hollyhill? He has to be running from the law.”

“I don’t think he’s hiding from the law,” David said.

“He’s hiding from something. But Tabitha.” Zella gave him a hard look. “You surely didn’t know she was coming and just keep it a secret from all of us.”

“Nope, we came home from Mt. Pleasant Church last night, and there she was on the porch.”

Zella’s smile came back. “How amazing! How old is she now?”

“She’ll be twenty next month.”

“Twenty? It’s been that long? That doesn’t seem possible. Well, tell her to come in to see me. You know I taught her to type when she was just a little thing and showed her how to water my violets without getting water on the leaves. She used to sit out here with me and draw rainbows when she came to work with you. She was such a sweet little girl.”

“Jocie could probably use some pointers about improving her typing.”

Zella slid a look his way. “She’ll be going to the high school in the fall. They have typing classes.”

David gave it up and went on into his office to call the mayor. No, the mayor didn’t have any concrete plans for the Fourth of July celebration. He was thinking some patriotic songs and maybe some preaching. Of course, they’d have to get the preacher at First Baptist for that. And the Christian Church preacher for the opening prayer. That wasn’t exactly equal time, but there were more Baptists in Hollyhill than Christian Church members.

“What about the Methodists?” David asked.

“Oh, they can come too,” the mayor said. “We don’t discriminate on denominations. Do you think, if you put something in the paper, we can get some of the folks to donate a little cash for a few fireworks? I was over at Grundy last summer on the Fourth, and they had this American flag in fireworks. Made me want to salute or something.”

“I’ll write an editorial,” David promised. “But we don’t have much time. Not even a whole month. We should have started planning earlier.”

“Well, I aimed to get started on it earlier, but you know how the time flies by. It feels like it ought to still be March instead of already June. Anyhow, we can’t go back and do any of that different. And we don’t have to have the fireworks. Just the singing and preaching and maybe the high school band out to play the national anthem. And Boy Scouts with flags. Girl Scouts too. Their cookie sale’s over, isn’t it? Maybe we could have a parade.”

“Sounds good, Mayor. You checked with the council members to see what they think?”

“Who cares what they think,” the mayor said shortly and then remembered who he was talking to. “Now, I don’t want to see that in print next week, David, but you know how a couple of them are. If I said we should put a water fountain in the Sahara Desert, they’d say nobody was ever thirsty there and even if they were they could drink sand like their daddies before them and a water fountain would be a misuse of city funds. Now, you know that’s true, David.”

David laughed. “Well, maybe, but surely everybody will want to get on the patriotic bandwagon.”

“They might climb aboard if they think they can push me off, but that’s the kind of thing a public servant has to deal with every day. So you’ll beat the drums a little to work up some interest? It’ll have to be in this week or next week.”

“Sure. Sounds like a great idea. Something to draw the community together.”

“Great. I’ll start passing the hat around the businesses on Main Street. If we get the parade idea going, that should mean some extra folks downtown shopping. A win-win situation for everybody.”

“Are you sure it’s not an election year?”

“If a man wants to stay mayor, every year’s election year,” Mayor Palmor said. “You just don’t have to put ads in the local paper every year.”

“You pay for them, we’ll run them.”

“Don’t you worry. I’ll be paying for plenty of ads next campaign, but right now you just make sure you remember who came up with the idea when you’re writing that Fourth of July piece.” The mayor laughed and hung up.

David dropped the receiver back on the phone and looked at the stacks of papers on his desk. All to-do piles instead of done piles. And he still had to call Matt McDermott. He pushed back from his desk and stood up. That could wait. It all could wait. He needed coffee and a good dose of banter from Wes. He’d get everything done. The Lord wouldn’t throw opportunities his way and then not help him handle them.

W
es was always a step ahead of Jocie in any conversation and ready for the sneakiest curveball, but the news about Tabitha seemed to surprise him. “Tabitha home? All the way from California?” he said. “She come in on a spaceship like me?”

“Nope. A bus,” Jocie said.

“All the way from California! Well, if that ain’t something.” Wes shook his head at the wonder of it. “Saturday the dog prayer. Sunday the sister prayer. You ain’t been praying anything about me, have you?” Wes looked worried.

“Just the usual everyday stuff. ‘God bless Wes and help him keep from mashing his fingers in the press, and don’t let his spaceship come back for a few more years.’ Nothing special.”

Wes looked at his ink-stained fingers. “You know, I haven’t got a single purple fingernail. I can’t remember that ever happening since I went to work for your dad. The dog prayer. The sister prayer. The no mashed fingers prayer. What else you been praying about?”

Jocie shrugged. “I don’t know. That Aunt Love doesn’t burn the house down. Rain for the farmers. Lost people get saved. Sick people get well. I don’t know. Daddy says half the time we don’t expect an answer when we pray anyway. We just do these little prayer chants without thinking about what we’re asking for.”

“Did you expect to get an answer to the sister prayer?”

“Well, yeah, but maybe not so soon after the dog prayer. It’s like God just looked down and said, ‘Oh, there’s Jocie. What is it she’s been praying for? Oh yeah, dogs and sisters.’ And wow, here they are.”

“And what about Tabitha? How was she? She was just a little kid like you last time I saw her.”

“I’m not a little kid. I’m thirteen.”

“Okay, so you’re almost grown and in another fifty years you’ll be old like me. But tell me about Tabitha. Did she grow up as pretty as I thought she would?”

“She’s pretty. Like I remember Mama. Of course, Tabitha didn’t have on any makeup like Mama always wore. Not even lipstick. Nothing except this rose painted on her cheek. But she’d been on a bus for days before she hitched a ride out to our house with a potato chip truck driver. I thought Dad would go bananas over that, but he stayed pretty calm. Then she camped out on the porch till we got home.”

“Why didn’t she go on in the house?”

“Said she wasn’t sure we still lived there. As if Dad would have moved without letting her know. Of course, he hadn’t written her for a while, since we didn’t have their latest address. Anyway, she’d had to rough it across country. Said she slept in the bus stations whenever she had a layover.”

“She came all that way by herself?” Wes shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “The Tabby I remember was a timid little thing, scared of her shadow. Bus stations have more than their share of shadows.”

“I don’t know, but she got here. I guess she might have looked a little nervous last night, but of course, everything was pretty crazy with Zeb barking and Aunt Love quoting Scripture and Dad just staring at her as if he couldn’t believe his eyes and not saying anything.”