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“And what if I’m out to use him for sex? What then, Mama? I’m not entertaining any fantasies about falling in love and getting married.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re still going to get hurt. You just need to stay away from the whole lot. Break it off with him. I insist.”
Pepper frowned, leaning back in her chair. “What happened, Mama? I’m not a child anymore, tell me the truth. Your words are those of a woman scorned. If they’re so awful, why don’t you tell me exactly how dangerous they are from your personal experience? Did you date Norman Chamberlain?”
Kate sighed and waited awhile before she answered. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that. It wasn’t exactly what you would consider dating, or the norm at the time, but we were together in secret for a few months.”
“Why in secret?”
Her mother snorted in contempt. “Because I wasn’t good enough for him. I was poor, my family was uneducated. He told me his mother wouldn’t approve of us, so he saw me quietly while he dated Helen to make Adelia happy.” This story didn’t ring true to Pepper. Not long ago, Ivy had told her about the discussion she and Adelia Chamberlain had at tea last summer. Adelia had been in the same shoes, the unsuitable girl. Why would she be prejudiced against a woman from the same background? She pressed her mother for the rest of the story. “What happened?”
“I fell for him. I was a fool, I know that now, but I got swept up in the forbidden aspect of the romance. And then one day, he told me that he’d proposed to Helen.”
“So he broke up with you?”
“No. He said he wanted to keep seeing me. That he loved me, but he had to marry Helen. I couldn’t agree to that, of course, so I broke it off with him.”
Pepper had a hard time connecting the dots. How had a short-lived love affair poisoned her mother against the entire family? “You guys broke up, he married another woman. I can see how that could be hard on you, but I don’t understand all the animosity. All these years later, you hate the entire family like they betrayed you somehow. What else happened?”
“Isn’t that enough? He took my innocence, Pepper. He told me he loved me, then tried to relegate me to a mistress he kept in the shadows.”
Pepper sat quietly. There was more to the story. If there was one thing she knew, it was that her mother was uncomfortable with silence. If Pepper sat quiet long enough, she would spill.
Her mother watched Pepper, waiting for a reaction that wouldn’t come. After a full minute, she sighed and slumped in her chair. A sadness drew down the corners of her mouth and a distance in her eyes made her look as though she’d slipped fully into the past. “I’m just trying to protect you from making the same mistakes I made. Do you think this Chamberlain boy would do the right thing if you got pregnant?”
Pepper’s heart stuttered in her chest, not beating for two whole seconds until she sucked in a panicked breath. “Pregnant? Who’s talking about being pregnant?”
“I’m talking about being pregnant. Because that’s what happened to me.” Kate let the words hang in the air for a moment for Pepper to absorb them. “I didn’t find out until after Norman and I had broken up. The wedding plans were in full swing, the invitations had gone out, and I finally worked up the nerve to drive to Birmingham and buy a pregnancy test where no one could see me do it. It was positive. I sat in my car and cried for an hour at the gas station.”
“What happened?” Pepper said, now on the edge of her seat. How had she never known about this?
“I finally found the courage to tell Norman. In retrospect, I don’t know what I expected him to say. I guess in my childish romantic fantasies, I thought he’d break it off with Helen and marry me because that was the right thing to do. That wasn’t reality, of course. Norman basically told me that it didn’t matter if I was pregnant. He was marrying Helen and didn’t care about me. He gave me a check for a thousand dollars and told me to deal with it. I could have the child, not have the child, it made no difference to him, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it. And if I told anyone it was his, he’d ruin me. No one would believe that he’d stoop to sleeping with trash like me, he said. I thought he loved me.” Kate shook her head sadly. “I was young and stupid, but my heart was just broken. I was completely devastated.”
Pepper couldn’t imagine such a thing, especially in such a small town. Everyone would find out about it. How did Norman expect her to keep something like that a secret? Someone would believe her. And yet she had kept it quiet—from Pepper at least.
“What did you do?”
Kate’s eyes dropped into her lap, tears threatening to rush down her reddened cheeks. “I did what I had to do, Pepper. Until you’re in a position like that, you don’t know what you’re capable of. I just . . . I can’t talk about it and I never have. You can’t tell anyone what I’ve told you. Not even your brother. This is a secret I’ve held for a long time, and I’ve only told you the truth because I need you to understand what that family is capable of. The Chamberlains will chew you up and spit you out. Don’t ever forget that.”
Grant’s first day back to work was a rough one. It was always hard to go back after a stretch of seven days off, but considering he’d done nothing but hard labor the whole time, this past stretch hadn’t felt like much of a break. He was hopeful for a quiet day.
That, of course, meant that it would be chaotic at best. At least he was working with Mack today. The fire chief was a pretty mellow guy. It took a lot to get him spun up, and Grant was trying to learn from his example.
He slipped down into a seat at the kitchen table of the small, two-story firehouse. The historic site had always been the Rosewood fire station. The narrow building had originally housed the water wagon and stalls for the horses that pulled it.
Updates over the years had allowed them to accommodate the newer, larger fire trucks, and eventually, their ladder truck. The new truck pretty much took up the entire ground floor. Their equipment was along the wall of the garage in lockers, but their desks, common area, kitchen, and bunks were upstairs.
Mack was reading the latest issue of the Rosewood Times when Grant sat down. “Morning,” he said, flicking his gaze over Grant. “Have a nice Valentine’s Day with your bidder?”
Grant smiled ear to ear. “Yeah . . .” he said, not wanting to elaborate. It had been a great day, perhaps his best ever. After all the grief the guys had given them at her house, he wasn’t about to speak a peep of that to anyone until he knew what he was going to do about the newly developing relationship. “We were so exhausted from all the work on the house that we
just went to Whittaker’s with everyone else in town. How about you? Who bid on you again?”
“Cheryl Buckman.”
“That’s right, the ice-cream lady.” Grant smiled. Cheryl was in her forties, around Mack’s age, and never married. She spent all her time at Scoops, her family’s ice-cream parlor on the square. From Grant’s limited assessment of her, her biggest liability was that she never seemed comfortable in her own skin. That was a guaranteed man-repellant. Mack seemed like just the right kind of guy for her. He liked his women soft and curvy, and he had an unmatched sweet tooth. “So . . . did you get to taste two scoops of her creamy goodness?”
Mack folded the paper and frowned at him. “I’m not a gigolo. It was just a date. A nice date, but just a date.”
