Lavender Morning Read online

  But he was watching Miss Edi as though trying to assess her, to see if it was all right for his daughter to be with her. Miss Edi turned away. Better to ask if the child should be with him.

  It was only minutes before Jocelyn returned with the chalk, and Miss Edi showed her how to draw the hopscotch chart on the concrete driveway, throw the rock, then follow it on one foot. She’d been delighted by the game.

  A few days later, when Edi opened her front door and saw the scrawny, poorly clad little girl, her blonde hair covering her face, sitting on her front steps and crying, she wasn’t surprised.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said as she jumped up. “I didn’t mean to…” She didn’t seem to know what to say.

  Edi saw the corner of a plastic suitcase behind a hibiscus bush and figured the child was running away from home.

  That first day, Edi purposefully kept the child at her house for nearly three hours. They talked of books and a science project she was making at school. What Edi wanted to do was teach that father of hers a lesson; she wanted to make him worry. He should pay more attention to where his child was.

  While Edi walked Jocelyn back to her house, she was thinking that when the relieved parents came to the door, she would give them a piece of her mind. But to Edi’s shock, her father and stepmother hadn’t been aware that the girl had run away. Worse, when they were told, they weren’t worried or surprised. Their attitude was that Jocelyn did what she wanted to and they had no idea what that was.

  That night, Edi called Alex and told him the child’s situation was worse than he’d thought. “She’s extremely intelligent and loves learning and culture. You should have seen her face when I played Vivaldi! It’s as if Shakespeare were living with the town morons. Did I tell you about those two repulsive stepsisters of hers?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, “but tell me again.”

  The next weekend, as Edi hoped she would, the girl showed up on the sidewalk, trying to look as though she were just passing by. Edi asked the child in, then called her father and asked if she might be allowed to help Edi with a project she was working on. That he didn’t ask what the project was or inquire about the length of the stay solidified her bad impression of him. “Yeah,” her father said on the phone, “I heard about you and I know where you live. Sure, Joce can stay there. If you gotta lotta books Joce’ll be happy. She’s just like her momma.”

  “Then she may stay here for the afternoon?” Edi asked, sounding even more stiff than she usually did. She was trying to conceal a growing dislike for the man.

  “Sure. Let her stay. We’re gonna go to a rally so we’ll be home late. Hey! You wanta keep her overnight, you can do that. I bet Joce’d like that.”

  “Perhaps I shall,” Edi said, then hung up.

  Jocelyn had spent the night. In fact, they enjoyed each other’s company so much that the child didn’t leave until Sunday evening. As she started to go, she turned back, ran to Edi, and threw her arms around her waist. “You are the nicest, smartest, most wonderful person I’ve ever met.”

  Edi tried to remain aloof, but she couldn’t help hugging the girl back.

  After that, Jocelyn spent weekends at Edi’s house and most of the holidays. They were two lonely people who needed each other and were thrilled to have found one another. They made a life together, with outings on Saturdays, church on Sundays, and time to be quiet and sit in the garden.

  As for her father, for all that Edi had at first judged him to be uncaring, she found out that he loved his daughter as much as he’d loved her mother, and all he wanted was for Jocelyn to be happy. “I can’t give her what she woulda had if her mother had lived,” he told Edi, “but maybe you can. Joce can go to your house all she wants to, and if you need anything from me, you just let me know.” He glanced at his wife and twin stepdaughters waiting for him in the car. “They’re like me and we fit together, but Joce is…different.”

  Edi knew what it felt like to be different, and Jocelyn was as out of place in her home as Edi had been at times in her life.

  The years with Jocelyn had been the happiest of Edi’s life. It had been wonderful to teach a young mind, and to show her the world. When her family went to Disney World, Edi took Jocelyn to New York to the Metropolitan Opera. When her stepsisters were wearing short shorts to show off their long legs, Jocelyn was wearing Edi’s pearls with a twin set.

  The summer Joce turned sixteen, she and Miss Edi went to London, Paris, and Rome together. The traveling had been difficult on Miss Edi. Between her legs and her age, she didn’t have much energy. But Jocelyn had spent the days wandering about the cities and photographing them. In the evenings she shared her new stories with Miss Edi’s old ones.

  In London Edi had shown Joce where she’d met David—no last name given—the man she’d loved and lost. “There was only one man for me, and he was it,” she said as she looked at the big white marble building where they’d met.

  By that time, Jocelyn had heard the story a dozen times but she never tired of it. “One love.” “A love for all time.” “A forever love.” These were terms she’d heard many times. “Hold out for it,” Miss Edi said. “Wait for that kind of love,” she advised, and Jocelyn had always agreed. One true love.

  Besides the pleasure of the time they spent together, as she grew older, Jocelyn often aided Miss Edi with the charities she administered. Joce did research and sometimes even traveled to see them. Three times she discovered frauds and as a result, she developed friendships with a couple of men in the local police department.

  But what Miss Edi never told was that the money she gave away wasn’t hers. She carefully concealed the fact that the money came from Alexander McDowell of Edilean, Virginia. In all their years of friendship, neither his name nor the town’s was ever mentioned.

  When Jocelyn started going to a small college not too far away, Edi had been lost without her. At first, Jocelyn had been so busy with her weekend job and all she’d had to do to put herself through school, she couldn’t even call. They e-mailed and texted often—Miss Edi loved any new technology that came out—but it wasn’t the same.

  After six months of college, Miss Edi started paying Jocelyn’s tuition so she wouldn’t have to spend all her time at the school. This was done without the knowledge of her father or the “Steps,” as they called the two skinny, blonde twins. Edi didn’t think her father would object, but she didn’t want to risk it. And she especially didn’t want to risk that the stepdaughters would hit her up for money. Although people often spoke of how beautiful the girls were, Edi didn’t find them so. Several times they’d shown up at Edi’s house when Jocelyn wasn’t there, and they’d looked around her house as though they were trying to guess the value of everything. Edi disliked them as much as she loved Jocelyn.

  Jocelyn graduated from college with a degree in English literature and got part-time work at the same school as a teaching assistant. And through a friend of Miss Edi’s, she got freelance employment helping authors research the biographies they were trying to write. Joce was excellent at both jobs, and she especially loved spending her days in libraries, buried in old files.

  When Edi realized that the little pains in her chest were more than just aging, she started thinking about Jocelyn’s future. If Edi died and left everything to Jocelyn, as she planned to do, she had no doubt that the Steps would do what they could to take it from her.

  Edi wanted to leave Jocelyn with a great deal more than just her possessions. She wanted to leave her with a future. No. What she really wanted was to leave her a family. Jocelyn had spent most of her life living with old people, first her grandparents, then Miss Edi. Edi had taken everything she knew about Jocelyn into consideration, then she’d spent a long time and done a lot of work to figure out how to give Jocelyn what she needed.

  Now, she closed the lid on the book of memorabilia and slowly made her way to the kitchen. What dreadful thing had the little nurse left her for dinner? Probably something with the word taco in the title.