Janice Macdonald - Return To Little Hills

In the car she pulled off her jacket, tossed it onto the back seat, kicked off her heels, which had elevated her exactly to the level of Peter Darling’s gray-green eyes, threw them into the back, too, and sat grinning idiotically at the cracked green vinyl-covered dashboard.

Zowee!

Shaking her head, she pulled down the driving mirror to look at her face: flushed scarlet. The car, she noted belatedly, was a furnace. She rolled down the driver’s window, still seeing Peter Darling’s face.

Zowee!

If every female in the place wasn’t having indecent dreams about him, she’d…eat her press pass.

Dear Reader,

Sometimes I think that writing fiction is a little like making a patchwork quilt—you take a little of this, a piece of that and, oh yes, got to find a place for that little scrap. I felt that way as I wrote Return to Little Hills. While the characters, the situations and the locales are all fiction, I frequently found myself digging into the ragbag of my own life.

Okay, this is the time to say—I should probably underline this part—that my own elderly mother, while hard of hearing, is much more kind, understanding and all-around wonderful than Edie’s mother. Are you reading this, Mum? And my sister, Kathleen, is—thankfully—nothing at all like Viv. Okay, Kaff?

That said, though, I really enjoy writing about the dynamics of family relationships. Families are a source of incredible joy and comfort and, let’s face it, have the unique capacity to get under our skin in no time flat, as my heroine, Edie, discovers when she returns to her hometown of Little Hills, Missouri.

I hope you enjoy Return to Little Hills. Please write to me at Janice Macdonald, P.O. Box 101, 136 East 8th Street, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or visit my Web site at www.janicemacdonald.net.

Oh, one more thing. If, like Edie (and myself), you’re a gooey-butter-cake aficionado, send me your recipes! I’ll try to publish a few on my Web site.

Best wishes,

Janice

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Kaff, with much love

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

“DON’T SNAP AT ME,” Edie Robinson’s mother said as Edie maneuvered Maude’s elderly Chevrolet Nova into the parking lot of the Little Hills IGA. “No one asked you to come back. You’re busy, we all know that. You’ve got an important job. Nobody expects anything from you. All I said was I needed toilet paper—”

“You told me four times, Mom.”

“Why would I have said limes?” Maude’s voice was indignant. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a lime if it bit me on the nose. I need toilet paper and…denture cleaner,” she added in a conspiratorial whisper. “But if you’re going to snap at me, forget it. Viv will take me. Viv can always make time, not that she isn’t busy, too, but all I have to do is pick up the phone and—”

“Viv walks on water, Mom. I don’t.” “Sarcastic,” Maude would have shot back if she’d heard anything more than a muffled jumble of words. “You’ve always been sarcastic, Edith.” With her right hand, Edie massaged the knot of tension in the back of her neck that usually only hit her when she procrastinated on a deadline, and cruised the lot for a parking space close to the market entrance. She watched a woman in pink tights and a maternity top load groceries and three small kids into a minivan. God. Three kids and the woman had to be at least fifteen years younger than she was. Edie glanced in the rearview mirror, frowned at the vertical lines around her mouth and thought to hell with it. When the van finally pulled away, Edie slid into the spot, switched off the ignition and turned in the seat to look directly at her mother.

Maude was eighty and, despite the late-summer Missouri heat, wore a black woolen cardigan over a cotton housedress blooming with improbably vivid peonies. On her feet, little pink ballerina-style slippers and knee-high support hose. For some reason, the sight of Maude’s tiny slipper-clad feet and swollen ankles made Edie want to weep. She reached over and scooped up Maude’s left hand in her own. Maude’s felt soft and almost boneless, fingers clutched around a wad of tissue. “I didn’t mean to snap at you,” Edie said. “I’m sorry.”

Her chin trembling, Maude scrabbled for the door handle. “You’ve always had a short temper, Edith. I said to Viv just the other day, I never know what’s going to set Edith off. You’ll have to come and open this door for me, it sticks. You’re just like your father in that way.” She pushed ineffectively at the door. “Viv said she’d have Ray look at it—”

“Mom, leave the door alone. I’ll open it for you. You need to get rid of this damn car. Unless,” she muttered facetiously, “you’re going to start driving again.”

“Ham.” Maude clutched her purse close to her chest. “They’ve got that sliced ham on sale. I like a slice of ham for dinner. Can’t eat anything too heavy before I go to bed, or I’m up all night with heartburn. Viv tell you about the new principal at Ray’s school?”

“She mentioned him.” An understatement. From the moment Viv picked her up at the airport the night before, her sister had talked about little else. Peter Darling: English, wife died of cancer, four small children, collects butterflies, Ray says he won’t last. Too pie-in-the sky. Twenty years of journalism had trained her to isolate and retain the salient facts of any information she was given. She’d retained these particular snippets because the idea of raising four small children with or without a spouse appalled her and because she’d probably meet Peter Darling tomorrow when she gave a talk to students at the school. Her brother-in-law, the assistant principal, had hit her with the request late last night and she’d agreed before she realized she didn’t particularly want to do it.

Too late now. She grabbed the keys, got out of the car and walked around to the passenger side. Waves of heat rose up from the parking lot. A line of sweat trickled down her back, pasting her cotton shirt to her skin. It had been nearly midnight when she’d stepped out of the airport and the warm, moist temperature had hit her like a slap in the face. This morning, the relentlessly cheerful weatherman on Maude’s ancient Magnavox had announced that the day promised to be another scorcher, even hotter than yesterday. She’d snapped off the set as he’d been yammering on about the misery index.

No one expects anything from you. She pulled open the heavy door and leaned inside to unfasten her mother’s seat belt. Maude’s hair, soft and fine as cobwebs, brushed against her cheek. Edie caught a whiff of mothballs and peppermint candy. But you’re glad I’m here, aren’t you, Mom? You miss me sometimes. Don’t you?

“Okay, there you go.” She stood back and extended her hand; Maude ignored it. “Going to be another hot day,” she said as Maude slowly swung her legs around. “You’re going to bake in that sweater. Want me to help you off with it?”

“Don’t rush me.” Maude’s little pink slippers were gingerly touching down on the asphalt. “I know you’re in a hurry, you’re always in a hurry, but it takes me a while these days.”

“Take your time, Mom. I’m not going anywhere.” Her mother’s face was flushed with heat and exertion and, as she helped her out of the car, Edie slid her palm under the shoulder of Maude’s black sweater and felt damp warmth. “Let me help you take it off, Mom. You’ll be more comfortable.”

Maude shook off Edie’s hand. “The store’s air-conditioned. I’ll need my sweater.”

“You got it.” Her arm linked in Maude’s, they made their way slowly across the parking lot. “Okay, toilet paper, denture cleaner and ham. Is that it?”

“Yams?” Maude shook her head. “Get some for yourself if you want, I won’t eat any.” She turned her pale blue eyes on Edie. “You probably ate that sort of thing in…where was it you were last? I can’t keep up with all the places you’re off to. I said to Vivian, no wonder Edith never married. What man would want to go traipsing around the world after her?”

“I’ll get you a basket.” At the entrance to the store, Edie separated a cart from the line and wheeled it over to Maude. “There you go. Want me to push it for you?”

“I need it to lean on.” Maude elbowed Edie aside. “Now, I’ll be as quick as I can,” she said as they progressed sedately along the dairy aisle. “Just don’t lose your temper with me. There’s no call for it. Vivian doesn’t snap at me the way you do, she knows it takes me longer these days. She said to me when we knew you were coming, she said, ‘Mom. Edith’s just going to upset you the way she always does.’ Viv thinks about these things.”

Edie bit the inside of her lower lip very hard and sent a prayer aloft. Please, please give me patience. Half of my sister’s saintliness would help, too. And please, please, I know it’s too late to expect much in the way of mother-daughter bonding. I know we’re not going to snuggle up in bed for heart-to-heart talks over mugs of cocoa, but please, please, let this be a…pleasant visit. And please, please, don’t let me snap at her. Even though I didn’t snap at her in the first place.

“EDIE ROBINSON!” the cashier shrieked some forty-five minutes later when Edie followed Maude with her brimming basket to the checkout line. “My God, I don’t believe it. When did you get back?”

“Last night.” A package of toilet paper in one hand, Edie grinned at the woman she’d last seen at their twenty-year high-school reunion which—she did a quick mental calculation—was nearly three years ago. Honey Jones, she immediately observed, was probably fifteen pounds heavier than she’d been back then and her blond hair was gray at the roots. God, you’re shallow, Edie scolded herself as she began piling stuff on the conveyor belt. Yeah, but when you’re barreling along the road to middle age, she justified, you notice these things. “So, Honey,” she said. “What’s going on with you these days?”

Honey grinned broadly. “Same old, same old. Get up, go to work, come home, get dinner for Jim and the kids. Go to bed. Do it all over again the next day. But what about you?” She glanced at Maude, who had dug a fistful of coupons from her purse and now held them close to her face as she slowly inspected each one. “The last I heard, your mom said you were in…”

“Afghanistan,” Edie said when it became clear the answer wasn’t on the tip of Honey’s tongue “Before that, Bosnia.” Chechnya, Somalia, Rwanda. She’d covered them all. Dangerous, difficult, complex, frustrating. But a piece of cake compared to Little Hills, Missouri. “Doing okay, Mom? Want me to help you sort through those coupons?”

“Frozen peas,” Maude said. “Too much sodium in the canned ones.”