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Pepper got a call from her mother early the next morning. Well, early-ish. It was almost ten, but considering she’d been making love with Grant until the sun had nearly risen, it seemed like dawn.
Through her sleepy ears, she deciphered that she was to come over at one for Sunday supper. There was no arguing the point, especially if she wanted to go back to bed anytime soon. Her mother was cooking a roast and Logan was coming, too.
Pepper acquiesced and then rolled back over to sleep for another hour and a half. Around noon, she shooed Grant out of her bed, got into the shower, and got ready to drive to her parents’ place.
Their sixties-era brick rancher had once been the main house at a large soybean farm. The owners decided to build a larger, more impressive farmhouse, and sold off a parcel of two acres with the older home on it. By the time her parents moved, Logan had already gone off to college and Pepper had gotten her own apartment. It was a modest home, but it inspired her to save her pennies and one day buy her own place.
When she arrived and pulled open the screen door, the house was quieter than she expected. There should’ve been sports on too loud in the living room with her dad perched in his recliner. Logan should’ve been beside him, shouting his sports commentary over the television.
Instead, she strolled through the dark, quiet living room and into the kitchen. There, she found her mama hard at work cleaning up. “Hey, Mama,” she said.
“Hey, sugar. Glad you could make it. I made your favorite coconut cake for dessert.”
“You didn’t have to go to all that trouble.” She knew her mother’s coconut cake recipe was a major ordeal that involved actual coconuts, not some mix by Betty Crocker. She usually only got that on her birthday.
“That’s okay, I wanted to.”
“Where’s Daddy?” Pepper asked.
Kate Anthony looked up from the dishes in the sink and brushed an errant strand of gray-streaked red hair out of her face. The rest was pulled up in a prim bun the way she’d always worn it. As a child, when her mother worked at the elementary school cafeteria, she’d had to wear it that way beneath her hairnet. It had been years since she’d graced an industrial kitchen, but the hair was the same.
“Logan took him down to the shop,” she said. “He wanted to see how things have been going at the garage without him. He seems to be doing a lot better lately, thank the Lord.”
Pepper sat down at the kitchen table. She had an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Her mother made her favorite cake. She could smell a pot roast cooking in the oven, but dinner was an hour away at least. Something was up. She had a pretty good idea she wouldn’t like whatever it was.
“Why did you invite me over so early?”
“Can’t a mother want to spend time with her busy daughter she never sees?”
Pepper looked at her mother with her lips pressed into a hard line. “Spill it, Mama.”
“Fine,” Kate said. “We’ll skip the pleasantries.” She dried her sudsy hands on a dishtowel and sat down at the table opposite Pepper. “I invited you over early because I wanted to talk to you without your daddy or brother here. What’s going on with you and that Chamberlain boy?”
Pepper sighed, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. As a teenager, that would earn her extra chores. She was a grown woman now, but somehow, she didn’t think the results would be any different. “His name is Grant,” she corrected.
“It doesn’t matter,” her mother said. “One Chamberlain is the same as any other. And they’re all up to no good. What are you doing spending so much time with him?”
Pepper hadn’t told her mother about this, and for good reason. How had she found out? “Did Logan tell you? I’m gonna kill him.”
Kate pursed her lips and then shook her head. “No, he didn’t, althou
gh he’ll get a talking-to for hiding this from me. I heard about it at church this morning. I was standing out on the front steps waiting for your daddy to finish talking to Reverend Yates, when Connie Jackson came up to me. Apparently you were spotted having a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner with him last night.”
Pepper crossed her arms defiantly over her chest. “And what about that is a surprise? Surely you heard about my unfortunate auction incident. I paid a fortune for that date, why wouldn’t I go on it?”
“You didn’t have to go. And from what I’ve heard, it wasn’t just a dinner. He’s been at your house all week.”
“Helping me,” Pepper said with emphasis. “My house is functional for the first time since I bought the place and it’s all because of Grant. He has done nothing but go out of his way to help me.”
“To get you in bed,” she replied with a bitter tone tainting her words.
“Mama, he’d already had me in bed long before all that, so you can throw that logic out the window.”
Her mother gasped and brought a hand to her bosom in melodramatic southern fashion. “Pepper, no!”
“I’m twenty-six years old, Mama. You can’t be surprised I’m not a virgin.”
“I don’t expect you to be a virgin, Pepper. But I did expect you to keep away from the Chamberlains. Have I taught you nothing? Did all my words of wisdom fall on deaf ears? They’re just out to use you for sex.”
