“So now everyone in town is angry at me. My father’s half in love with you; my mother is so mad that she won’t invite me over for dinner even once a week, so right now I’m at the mercy of Ingrid and a microwave. And the church sent the pastor over to have a talk with me about infidelity and about corrupting minors. Maybe he means Ingrid, but thanks to enough Botox to give her the plague, she only looks fourteen.
“So I came over here to dig. Nobody else in town will let me near their gardens, but I need to work with the earth. You have any problem with that?”
“You like pot roast?”
“Pot roast?” he asked dumbly.
“With carrots and Worcestershire sauce. I have your mom’s recipe.” She put her hand up. “If you start crying, you can’t have any.”
Luke pulled the shovel out of the dirt and tossed it onto the back of his truck. “Why do I feel like I’m the object of some plot?”
“Join the club,” Joce said. “Your grandfather is using me to get you away from the…I want to quote him exactly…‘that grasping little gold digger he married.’ Yeah, that was it.”
“Shouldn’t you be keeping this a secret between you and my grandfather?”
“Are secrets allowed in this town?” she asked as they neared the house. “I thought there was a law against them. Keep a secret and get put in jail. On the other hand, your cousins kept the secret of your being married so well that not even Tess knew about it. I hear she yelled at Ramsey so long and loud that they had to repaint his office.”
He blinked at her. “I think you’ve lived in Edilean too long.”
“But you came back to it from wherever you were, doing whatever you were doing…” She looked around to see if there was anyone near, then lowered her voice. “Up north.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Did you know that your right eyebrow twitches on the tip when you lie?”
“No, that’s hunger.”
“Whatever it is, you and everyone else have again jumped over some big secret about you. I mean, other than the fact that you’re married, that is.”
“About to be unmarried,” he said as he opened the door and let her go in first.
“Don’t tell me you at last had t
he courage to file for a divorce.”
“Annulment. We haven’t spent enough time together to call it a marriage.”
“And she committed fraud,” Joce said softly. “You thought you were getting one kind of woman and she turned out to be something else.” Joce politely left out the truth, that she’d used her pregnancy to get him to marry her, then had an abortion.
“Yeah,” Luke said, “but maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe I should have…”
“So she came back to see if you two could get back together?”
“More or less,” he said as she handed him a beer.
“And how’s that working?”
Luke gave a one-sided grin. “Not so good. How come you aren’t still mad at me?”
“Your grandfather said that if I talk to you he’ll let us have part two of Miss Edi’s story.”
“That the only reason?”
“Only one. As I’m sure you know, I’m trying to write a book about Miss Edi, but I can’t find a lot of information. I need those stories.”
“So it’s just work, is it?”
“Just work,” she said, but she was smiling.