The Mulberry Tree

Five and a half weeks ago, Patsy had called Bailey and said she had to go to Welborn, would Bailey like to go with her? Since it was a weekday and Matt was out working, and since Bailey had already filled her entire pantry with bottles and jars of homemade preserves, pickles, and cordials, she had nothing whatsoever else to do. Even her search into Jimmie’s past had been halted. Matt’s search on the title to her property had come up empty. Any buying and selling of the house had been done earlier than the records that were put into the computer data banks.

When Patsy drove into Bailey’s driveway, she hadn’t been surprised to see Janice sitting in the backseat. It was on the tip of Bailey’s tongue to ask how Patsy had asked Janice to go with her, but she didn’t ask.

On the thirty-minute drive into Welborn, Bailey chatted with both Patsy and Janice, finding out more about their lives while trying her best not to give away anything about herself.

/> Welborn was what Bailey had expected it to be: a thriving tourist town with the usual shops that catered to the rich. As the three of them walked along the streets and looked in the windows, Bailey was glad that the highway had bypassed Calburn. For all that Calburn looked abandoned, there was something real about it that Welborn didn’t have.

“People should work here and live in Calburn,” Bailey had said, looking into the window of a shop that sold New Age books and crystals.

“Then they could afford to rebuild the old houses,” Patsy said.

“Calburn needs a business, a place where the women could work,” Janice said, and there was such bitterness in her voice that Bailey had looked at her sharply.

Maybe it was these words that set them to thinking, and ten minutes later, when they saw a gift shop that had a small For Sale sign in the corner of the window, none of them commented. But when they went to lunch, at the same restaurant where Bailey was today, they could talk of nothing else. Janice and Patsy sat on one side of the booth so they weren’t facing each other, and Bailey on the other.

It was Janice who started it. She was looking down at her big, plastic-coated menu when she said, “If we owned a shop, we could sell all those pickles and jams you make.”

In the next instant, all three of them were talking on top of each other, and, although Janice and Patsy didn’t make eye contact with each other, everyone was talking to everyone else.

“Crafts,” Patsy said. “I can sew anything.”

“Gift baskets!” Janice said. “We’d have a shop for gift baskets. They’d be full of your homemade jams and jellies and—”

“And Patsy’s sewn things,” Bailey said. “One time a rich woman I knew got a little dragon with her name on it from her husband, and I swear she liked it better than the diamonds he gave her.”

“He probably gave her the diamonds out of guilt,” Patsy said.

“As a matter of fact, he did,” Bailey said, and the three of them laughed.

The idea of their buying the little shop in the tourist town seemed to grow with every minute. They were three women with too much time on their hands. Janice had two young daughters, but Bailey had found out that her husband’s mother lived with them, and the girls would just as soon be with their grandmother as with their mother. When Janice said this, Bailey saw something in her eyes, something she’d seen when she’d toured Patsy’s house, but Bailey wasn’t sure what it was. Anger, maybe. Or perhaps it was a sense of having surrendered.

By the time they’d finished lunch, the women were talking money. They walked back to the shop, went inside, then began to rearrange it in their minds. At the moment the shop was one of many in Welborn that sold a little bit of several things but specialized in nothing. There were T-shirts that said “Welborn, Virginia,” on them, a couple of shelves full of candles, some cheap toys for the kids. The owner came out from the back and showed them around. There was the pretty little glassed-front showroom, and in the back was a three-room area that could be used for storage and work. “It used to be a florist’s shop,” the woman said.

When she opened the back door and let them out into a big parking lot, for a moment the three women just stood there blinking in the sunlight, not quite sure what to do next. They knew that this was the turning point. Did they go home and forget about this, or did they pursue it?

It was Janice who made the decision. “First we need to find out about the competition. Are there any other gift basket shops in Welborn? I’m not sure this area is big enough to handle two of the same business. And somebody needs to talk to the realtor about money. And we need a researcher to find out just how we go about running a gift basket shop—and even if that’s what we want to do.”

Now, thinking about that afternoon, Bailey smiled. Janice was like a drill sergeant. Instantly, Bailey and Patsy had snapped to attention, and each woman had instinctively known what her job was. Patsy ran off to find out about other shops in the area, and Bailey went to the local library to see what she could find out, while Janice went to the real estate office to talk about money.

By the time the women met again, it was six P.M., and they had a thousand things to report to each other. Patsy drove them back to Calburn, stopping on the way to go to the grocery, the women pushing their three baskets down the aisles while talking nonstop.

And when they got home, they talked the same way to the men they lived with. Janice told Scott how she was going to keep the books for their new company, Patsy told Rick that she was going to be the creative director, and Bailey told Matt that she was going to look into renting a commercial kitchen so she could start producing her best-tasting products on a larger scale.

“We don’t know what to call the business,” all three women said to their men. “Do you have any ideas?”

Now, sitting in the same booth where she and Janice and Patsy had first talked about opening the business, Bailey looked at the brochure again. Yesterday the shop had been sold. But it hadn’t been sold to the three of them.

So what had happened? Bailey wondered. When they’d driven home that day, they’d been on top of the world. Bailey, laughing, truly laughing for the first time in a long time, had said, “We are three very bored women.”

That night, they’d been on the phone to each other, with Bailey receiving twice as many calls as Janice or Patsy because they would not get on the phone to each other, so Bailey had to tell Janice what Patsy said, and vice versa.

And throughout those first days, all three of the men had been wonderful. Matt volunteered to renovate the shop. Scott said he’d donate two vans, each only two years old. Rick, who owned three service stations and who, according to Patsy, could fix anything in the world, was going to provide free gasoline for the vans, plus maintenance. Patsy said her sons—and the word volunteered was not used—were going to do the driving to deliver the baskets that were ordered.

For an entire week, Bailey’s life had been very exciting, with constant phone calls and arrangements to be made, books to read, and Web sites to consult. With Matt’s help, she figured out how to use the Internet in record time. She had no idea how to use anything else on a computer, but Matt said he’d never seen anyone master the Web faster.

But after the first week, things had begun to change. Janice had called Bailey on Monday morning to say that Scott was in trouble with the IRS, and he desperately needed her help in straightening out a few things. She was sorry, but Scott said that she was the only person on earth he really trusted, so she hoped Bailey would understand. Two days later, Rick had thrown Patsy a birthday party and given her a sewing machine that could be hooked up to a computer and programmed to sew pictures. Patsy started spending so much time with the new machine that she didn’t have time to talk about the shop.

It was on Saturday morning that Matt told her his big news. He’d been asked by his old architectural firm to draw some house plans that could be sold on their Web site. In the past, plans sold through catalogs had had to be fairly bland, but with the introduction of the Internet to the world, people could have a wider selection.