Miss Julia Renews Her Vows Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Also by Ann B . Ross

  Miss Julia Delivers the Goods

  Miss Julia Paints the Town

  Miss Juila Strikes Back

  Miss Julia Stands Her Ground

  Miss Julia’s School of Beauty

  Miss Julia Meets Her Match

  Miss Julia Hits the Road

  Miss Julia Throws a Wedding

  Miss Julia Takes Over

  Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Ann B. Ross, 2010

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ross, Ann B.

  Miss Julia renews her vows / Ann B. Ross.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19006-7

  1. Springer, Julia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Married people—Fiction. 3. City and town life—North

  Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O84198M569 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2009042561

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For Claudia—beautiful, courageous and full of grace.

  Chapter 1

  “Mr. Pickens,” I’d said in a tone that demanded his full attention. And to make sure he listened, I raised my finger to him. “Mr. Pickens,” I said again, “if you break Hazel Marie’s heart, you will answer to me.”

  This little lecture occurred right after he’d resigned himself to the fact that he couldn’t wiggle out of it this time. He was roped and tied, and I intended to make sure he knew it.

  He clasped my finger and moved it aside. “Be careful where you point that thing.” Giving me that lopsided grin that told me he wasn’t taking seriously a word I said, he went on. “You can stop worrying, Miss Julia. My heart-breakin’ days are over.”

  “Seeing is believing, and with your marital history—which you’ve taken no pains to conceal—I have every reason in the world to worry. Three wives, Mr. Pickens, and not a one of them took. Marry ’em and leave ’em, that seems to be your motto, and I’m telling you now, I am not going to have Hazel Marie treated in that fashion.”

  “Now, Miss Julia,” he said, while those black eyes danced in his head. “I didn’t do the leaving. Every one of them left me, so, see, I am innocent on all counts.”

  “Huh,” I said, glaring at him. “If that’s true, it just goes to show that you were doing something wrong or not doing something right. I remind you, Mr. Pickens, that you have responsibilities now, and your carefree days of coming and going as you please are over.”

  “My goodness,” he said, grinning at me, “looks like I can’t win. But,” he went on, sobering up just slightly, “I am well aware of my responsibilities. You don’t have to remind me that Hazel Marie’s having twins.”

  “Hazel Marie’s having twins! Stop right there this very minute. She’s not having them. Both of you are, and I’ll point out to you that what you say and how you say it are fairly good indicators of how you think. So you just might take a good hard look at your own attitude toward those babies—they are yours, Mr. Pickens, and you are just as responsible for their existence as Hazel Marie is.” I gave him a sharp nod of my head to punctuate the statement. “And don’t you forget it.”

  We’d had that little conversation the morning of his and Hazel Marie’s wedding, although to call that hurry-up, practically last-minute civil ceremony a wedding made my skin crawl. Dashing down to the clerk of court’s office for a license early on a Monday morning, then making the drive to a magistrate’s office for legal sanction with no notice to friends or announcement in the Abbotsville Times, Hazel Marie in a skirt half zipped up with a safety pin to hold it on and crying because she wasn’t walking down an aisle with a cathedral train trailing along behind her, and Mr. Pickens gritting his teeth to get through it—well, I wouldn’t classify that as anybody’s idea of a proper wedding, even though it did get the job done. Thank the Lord.

  I was also thankful that our state did not require a waiting period, because we didn’t have a minute to lose getting those two married. We did, however, have to wait for Mr. Pickens to drive over to Asheville to get all his divorce decrees out of his lockbox. Seems you have to prove you’re unatt
ached before getting reattached. Then Sam, Lillian, Lloyd and I went with them to the courthouse and waited out in our car while Hazel Marie and Mr. Pickens went in to get the license, and I was just as glad not to have seen the clerk’s face when Mr. Pickens spread out all three decrees like a losing hand in gin rummy.

  I must say at this point that Mr. Pickens had shown some forethought by stopping at a jeweler’s and buying a wedding ring on his hurried trip to Asheville. It was only a plain gold band, but it was a wide, thick one, which with the cost of gold these days was no minor purchase. Of course, there was no engagement ring because there had been no engagement, but that could be rectified in the future, on an anniversary, perhaps, if they stayed married long enough to have one.

  When they came out of the courthouse and got in Mr. Pickens’s car for the trip to an out-of-town magistrate’s office for that travesty of a ceremony, we followed them. Going to Waynesville for the civil ceremony had been my idea, in order to forestall the Abbotsville Times from making a public announcement as to the exact date of legalization. If the Waynesville paper printed it in their public notices, more power to them because no one in Abbotsville would see it. Sam and I were to be the official witnesses, for which I was glad because I intended to make sure the whole thing was done up good and tight, so nobody would be able to talk his way out of it.

  Lloyd was the happiest of the entire wedding party, and I’m including the bride and groom. In fact, he could hardly sit still, for he was at last getting the daddy he’d never had and he loved Mr. Pickens to death. And to give the devil his due, Mr. Pickens felt pretty much the same way about him. Which was all the more reason to make sure that Mr. Pickens toed the line and kept his shoes under the right bed.

  Lillian was with us, too. She’d been at the house the day before, even though it was a Sunday, when Mr. Pickens came waltzing in with the announcement to all and sundry that he was marrying Hazel Marie the following morning. With a whoop of joy, she’d immediately started preparing dishes for the wedding luncheon.

  Lillian was another one who’d fallen under his spell, so he could do no wrong in her eyes. She gave him a lot more credit for good intentions than I did.

  She’d shown up on that Monday morning dressed in her Sunday churchgoing clothes: a solid white nylon dress with a red patent leather purse the size of a weekend suitcase and red patent leather heels that she could hardly walk in. And on her head, she wore a wide-brimmed red hat with silk anemones and a veil on it.

  That meant that Lillian was the only one of us wearing white, a fact that kept Hazel Marie in tears of recrimination at her own precipitous fall from grace, so obviously apparent from the size of her midsection.

  It got worse when Lillian happened to mention that Latisha, her great-granddaughter, had wanted to go to the wedding, but Lillian had left her with the neighbor lady. Hazel Marie really started crying then, because she couldn’t stand leaving Latisha out.

  “Just hold on,” Mr. Pickens said, showing remarkable self-control under the circumstances. “I’ll go get her.”

  “Well, you do that,” Lillian said, “an’ I got to set here an’ braid her hair for a hour or two, ’cause she can’t go lookin’ like she do now.”

  I had to step in then because any further delay in the wedding plans would make a nervous wreck out of me. “Go by and get her afterward, Mr. Pickens. She can come to the wedding luncheon. And Lillian, be sure to give her a handful of rice to throw.”

  “Yes’m, that do the trick an’ she won’t know the diff’rence.”

  So we got them married and those two rapidly growing infants legitimate. And when all is said and done, that was more important than a properly formal and traditional ceremony, although I was heartsick at the secrecy and the haste with which it had to be done.

  Chapter 2

  I was heartsick over more than that, though, for now came the need for explanations and cover-ups and outright lies that in the long run no one would believe. In truth, however, I didn’t care whether anyone believed them or not, just so they acted as if they did.

  Part of the problem was that this time I had no leverage by which to elevate Hazel Marie to a respectable position in the town. The first time, that time when she showed up at my front door with my recently deceased husband’s little son in tow, I had steeled myself to stare down the gossip and rumors, the whispers and the titters at how my pillar- of-the-church husband had betrayed me. I did it by accepting Hazel Marie and Little Lloyd myself, and, furthermore, by compelling the town to accept them, too. I was able to do it, too, because half the town owed money to Wesley Lloyd Springer’s estate and I announced that I was calling in the notes because I was sick and tired of my houseguest being snubbed. There must have been a number of heart-to-heart talks between husbands and wives all over town after that, for all of a sudden, Hazel Marie was invited to everything anybody was giving and to some things they’d just decided to give. The women, who are undoubtedly the worst when it comes to excluding people and standing on principles they don’t require of themselves, quickly decided that Hazel Marie was a lovely, if slightly countrified, young woman, and that with a little Christian charity on their part, she would fit right in. Their husbands breathed sighs of relief as I extended their loans at lower rates than Wesley Lloyd had been gouging them with.

  But this time, in spite of the fact that Hazel Marie was respectably married for the first time in her fortysomething years, there was nothing I could do to prevent people from ostracizing her after they counted on their fingers the length of time between wedding and birth dates.

  On the drive back from the magistrate’s office, Lloyd rode with his mother and new daddy. They would go by and pick up Latisha while Sam, Lillian and I went on home to prepare the bridal luncheon.

  With Lloyd out of our car, I was free to discuss the next problem facing us, so I did. “Sam,” I said, “how are we going to explain this?”

  “Explain what?” he asked as he merged onto the interstate.

  “Why, this hurry-up marriage without benefit of clergy and wedding invitations and parties and all the usual and expected festivities of a proper wedding. And explain, also, the fact that those babies are going to be born long before the normal nine-month span is up.”

  Sam, with his eyes on the road, smiled. “There’ve been a number of hefty premature babies born around town, Julia, so ours won’t be the first.”

  “That excuse won’t work in this case, because near as I can figure, Hazel Marie is already about four months along, and no way in the world will anybody believe five-month-premature babies can weigh six pounds each.”

  “I think of that, too,” Lillian chimed in from the backseat. “An’ ’sides that, twinses is known for comin’ early, so that don’t give us much time to play around in.”

  “Oh my goodness, Lillian, I hadn’t even thought of that. You’re both going to have to help me figure out what to do. I mean, what to say, because you know the first thing people’re going to ask is when did they get married. Especially when Hazel Marie announces her marriage wearing a maternity dress.”

  Sam glanced at me. “We should announce it, Julia. In fact, I think we should have a party—a big one at the country club, maybe, invite everybody and announce it there. And,” he went on with a grin, “dare anybody to say a word.”

  “They wouldn’t say anything, anyway,” I said with a sigh of despair. “They’ll be as nice as can be to my face and to hers, but then they’ll snub her as if she has leprosy. Strike her right off their dance cards. Their invitation lists, too.”

  Sam reached over to stroke my hand. “I think you’re worrying too much about it. Hazel Marie’s going to be so busy, she won’t notice what anybody else is doing. Or not doing.”

  “She sho’ will be, Miss Julia,” Lillian said, straining against her seat belt to lean up closer to the front seat. “She gonna be so full of bein’ married to Mr. Pickens, she won’t even want to go to no parties, an’ she not even see them give her the ev
il eye when she go to church. She gonna be so happy, she won’t care nobody else happy for her. And ’member this, twinses take up lots of time an’ she be too busy to worry ’bout what yo’ lady friends sayin’.”

  “Well, that’s another thing,” I said, recalling Hazel Marie’s announcement of her intentions the day before. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell this, but she told me yesterday that she intended this marriage to be in name only. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  Sam’s eyebrows went up and Lillian put her head back on the seat and murmured, “They Lord, what she gonna think of next?”

  Then Sam laughed. “You believe that, Julia?”

  “I don’t know if I do or not. She seemed pretty determined at the time. But then she acted real thrilled when Mr. Pickens showed up, so who knows what she’ll do. But she said she wasn’t going to put up with somebody who was just putting up with her because he was forced into marrying her. And I can’t say I blame her, except I don’t know if I can handle a quickie divorce. I’m not doing all that well with a quickie wedding.”

  Sam was a steady and trustworthy driver, so I didn’t have to watch everything he was doing. I could put my head back and listen to the hum of the tires on the pavement. But that respite didn’t last long, for I thought of something else to worry about.

  I sat up straight. “Sam, where’re they going to live? I couldn’t stand it if they moved to Mr. Pickens’s house in Asheville.”

  “I’ve already talked to him. They’ll live in my house, at least till the babies come and Hazel Marie’s back on her feet.” Sam was referring to the lovely old house where he’d lived for many years before we married. He still kept the house up, using it as an office for his retirement activities. And also using it as an excuse, in my opinion, to keep James employed. Sam had an unusually soft heart.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said, “but I’m a little surprised that Mr. Pickens agreed to it. He’s so independent, you know, and stubborn about some things, like accepting help from anybody.”