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Table of Contents
Synopsis
Title Page
Copyright Page
Other Books by Renée J. Lukas
Dedication
About the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Bella Books
Synopsis
Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Tennessee leaves Jesse Aimes confused about pretty much everything. Nothing makes sense to her at all. Not bell-bottoms or crazy teachers and especially not boys. But when she finally wins a spot on the high school basketball team, she begins to feel comfortable in her own skin.
Then her childhood best friend Stephanie comes back to town and stirs feelings in Jesse that leave her even more confused. She knows those feelings must be wrong. She only has to listen to the “you’re going to hell” sermons by her preacher father to know it.
But romance secretly blossoms between the two girls…until their secret is blown wide open by a jealous classmate. As the truth comes out it threatens everything—Jesse’s future in basketball, her family and even her relationship with Stephanie. What can she do when there seems to be no way out?
Copyright © 2016 by Renée J. Lukas
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
First Bella Books Edition 2016
eBook released 2016
Editor: Medora MacDougall
Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles
ISBN: 978-1-59493-505-3
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Other Bella Books by Renée J. Lukas
The Comfortable Shoe Diaries
Hurricane Days
Dedication
For the many LGBT and questioning teens…
don’t be afraid to be who you are.
About the Author
Renée J. Lukas is a novelist, screenwriter and cartoonist who lives in Massachusetts with her partner and two sons.
Chapter One
This is it, she thought, traveling down I-40—this is what hell feels like. Tennessee in the summer. No water. No convenience store for a cold beverage. If it weren’t for the occasional highway sign, it could have been Death Valley. As long as she didn’t see any human skulls frying in the sun, she could handle it.
Carolyn Aimes watched fir trees turn to poplars, skyscrapers morph into squatty old barns with rusty roofs leaning precariously to one side, New England light into a southern summer haze. The barrenness stretched out for miles in every direction, giving her the feeling that she and her new husband were the only people left on earth. They were driving to Dan’s hometown, turning off the highway and making their way down unpaved roads that seemed to have been forgotten by every road atlas. It wasn’t long before they were bouncing along dirt roads in the tan Plymouth Duster, not the sporty kind but the tamer sedan style without the racecar stripe on the side, a car conservative and modest enough to meet with Dan’s approval.
Dan Aimes was the only man she’d ever given a second look, and for that reason alone, she had decided to marry him. She’d never been to Tennessee, but she would do everything she could to make a good home and life with him there.
He’d try to make her feel at home, she knew, offering a pat on the knee or a placating gaze, but the expression made her uneasy; it felt insincere. It was a look she called his “preacher face,” familiar to her ever since she’d seen him in action at a religious conference in Boston. Carolyn wasn’t particularly religious. She’d stumbled onto his sermon quite by accident as he was speaking to an outdoor crowd near Faneuil Hall. She had been captivated by his passion and conviction, because she herself had doubts about the existence of God. She stood in the square, holding a shopping bag in each hand, feeling as though he was speaking directly to her.
Even more striking was the way Dan spoke—not like every other preacher with the typical inflections. He came across as almost subdued, then the moment you felt lulled into a peaceful state, he’d slam you between the eyes with a sharp, sudden outcry that got everyone’s attention and could very well have been dangerous to those with heart conditions.
He was so obviously talented as a speaker, he almost convinced Carolyn there was someone up in the sky who really cared what she did. It gave her a sense of comfort. Maybe she wasn’t alone in the world. Maybe things didn’t happen randomly, and each person had a path and a purpose. When his speech was done, he came over to talk to her. She was too busy blushing and trying to seem sophisticated to remember a word he said. But they were talking, and, before she knew it, she was giving him a tour of her city.
Back in the Plymouth Duster…
“We should take a bathroom break,” Dan said.
“I don’t have to go.” Carolyn stared ahead with steely determination. She’d never left home before, and she told herself that this was what it meant to be a grown-up. She’d been told she was a beautiful woman. When she spoke, she sounded like Jacqueline Kennedy. She resembled her too, with flawless features and jet-black hair styled in a sixties perm.
But today, as she dug her nails into the vinyl armrests, she lacked the confidence of a Kennedy. She missed her mother, Rose, a no-nonsense, hearty soul who still lived in Boston. After Carolyn’s father died, Rose had moved into a smaller, cottage-style home where she was surrounded by her good friends. She would never leave, Carolyn knew. She would have to be the one to go home to visit her mother, because Rose’s one experience with the South, a vacation just after the war, hadn’t been a pleasant one. Being in the South, she told Carolyn, was like being in a foreign country where no one understood her. She had asked for tonic in a store, and the clerk had brought her a bottle of what looked like medicine. She warned Carolyn to use the word “soda” if she wanted something to drink or she might accidentally get poisoned.
Carolyn’s mother’s admonitions still rang in her head. Rose was an encyclopedia of worst-case scenarios, and Carolyn knew she had to put these out of her mind if she was going to survive here.
Rugged back roads wound through what reminded her of scenes from The Grapes of Wrath—dusty and mostly flat all the way to the horizon. What had she gotten herself into?
“There aren’t any stops now for the rest of the way,” Dan said casually.
Carolyn filled with alarm. What if she had to pee?
An hour later…
“How much farther?” she asked in rising panic.
“Oh, it’s just up a ways.” Dan had a drawl like a slowly grazing cow. It was pleasing to the ear, making him the most popular preacher in the town where they would live. “Just up a ways,” Carolyn would come to understand, meant it could be half an hour. Or three hours. It was his way of minimizing everything, because, as he often said, nothing in this life was as important as the afterlife anyway. Carolyn, on the other hand, had a more practical outlook, because it was in this life that she might be needing to pee. For a woman who had been brought up to be ladylike at all times, the thought of squatting by the side of the road to pee behind some bushes was unthinkable.
Dan gave her hand a squeeze, and she took him in with one glance. His hair was combed in a style that was a decade out of date, with a shock of brown, which was almost the color of the car, parted and greased over to one side, and he wore black-rimmed, Buddy Holly glasses, a plain button-down shirt and brown polyester pants. She certainly hadn’t married him for his sense of style.
“It’ll be okay, hon,” he said.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she lied.
“A little music might be nice.” He turned on the radio, and they were promptly assaulted with news reports about Vietnam. He switched it off.
She sighed, glancing around, hoping to see something, anything, new on the horizon.
Nearly two hours later, they entered Greens Fork, Tennessee. An old Gulf gas station with peeling paint on the roof greeted them first, followed by a country store resembling a log cabin, and one main street, where the bank and some stores drew a few extra cars.
“Let’s try some fresh air,” Dan urged, rolling down his window.
Silently cursing him for shutting off the air conditioning, she dutifully rolled down her window too. Immediately, soaking wet air flooded in, making her blouse stick to her skin. She slapped at a mosquito feasting on her forearm, quietly regretting her decision to move here.
It wasn’t long before street signs gave way to gravel roads, and the car rocked violently back and forth over each pothole, some of them quite deep. The roads were terrible—Carolyn felt as though her internal organs were being rearranged with each bump. They passed a handmade sign that said something about free corn, but all the jostling in the car made it hard to read.
Greens Fork wasn’t exactly on the map; it was the kind of town you stumbled onto while trying to get to someplace better. But a few thousand people called it home, including Dan, who had been born and raised there. That, to her, made Greens Fork far more special than any other one-horse, or one-gas station, town.
Dan’s father had been the town’s beloved preacher for decades until he died suddenly of a heart attack. Dan had always wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, and when the news about his father spread around town, the people rallied around him, despite his youth. Dan’s natural talent as a preacher and his personal circumstances made him the obvious choice to be his father’s successor. Added to this, when Dan was only ten years old, his mother had left him and his father. Since then, he had been regarded as a poor orphan boy whose mother had cruelly abandoned him. Her flight in the dead of night was judged by the town to be the ultimate betrayal and Dan’s forgiveness of her was viewed as an almost divine act, another reason he was believed to be destined for the pulpit.
The public perception of his mother wasn’t exactly the truth, Dan had told Carolyn. His father’s drinking had gotten worse, and she decided she couldn’t take any more.
“Why didn’t she take you with her?” Carolyn had asked.
“I’m not sure she really had it in her to be a mother.” He was resigned about it, as if there were no emotional scars left. Everything was sewn up neat and tidy.
Dan finally pulled up to a two-story farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The only neighbors were a couple of cows and a wayward chicken. Carolyn eyed them—with their blank stares, even they seemed bored.
She opened the car door and stepped out for the first time on Southern Soil, a clay mud that was a red color she’d never seen before in nature. The mud gripped her feet like quicksand, seemingly trying to suck her down into the bowels of the earth.
“What is this?” she said, gripping the door handle. She tried to get traction, to no avail. Was this how people died in the Amazon? A million thoughts swirled around her brain. She hated that red mud. Before the day was over, it would spread from her shoes to almost everything she owned. She’d spend the next twenty years fighting a losing battle to get it out.
“Welcome home.” Dan wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly. Was he afraid that she might change her mind? She shifted, trying to get some kind of leverage with the car. He’d let go of her to get their suitcases out of the trunk. It took him a while to notice that she was practically lying across the hood of the car to avoid falling to the ground. Finally, though, the sounds of distress emanating from her throat caught his attention, and he took her hand and led her to drier ground.
She glanced at the bountiful acreage, squinting at it under a furious sun, and then at the house. He seemed to be waiting for her to marvel at it. It was much different from the houses she’d grown up with up north. She took a few steps closer. It had a quaint wraparound porch with a swing, a place where she could imagine having lemonade. Her eyes were drawn upward to some crooked gutters showing signs of wear and tear, the black shutters contrasting with what had been white vi
nyl siding. A good power wash would do it some good…
Desolate. That was the feeling rising inside her—a house presiding over a large tract of land without any civilization in sight. Where would she shop? Where would she…
“Our neighbors are over there,” he said, pointing past an overgrown field. “The Wallace farm.”
Obviously, “neighbor” meant something different here. In Boston, your neighbor was the one who could pass you a bag of sugar through an open window.
Maybe someday she could talk him into joining a larger congregation in a big city. A place like Nashville maybe. She had to have hope.
Chapter Two
Every year on Jesse’s birthday, her parents told her the same scary story about the trains that had collided in Boston when her mother was seven months pregnant with her. They had traveled up to the city to visit Carolyn’s mother. One mistake caused two tracks to line up just right for an accident, and her parents were in one of those trains.
Her father came out without a scratch. Her mother was rushed to Boston Medical Center where she’d lost so much blood they didn’t expect her—or her baby—to survive. Jesse was hanging on by a thread. And her mother’s legs were injured so badly she needed all kinds of x-rays and blood transfusions.
Luckily, Jesse’s older siblings were at their grandmother’s house during this time, so they didn’t have to witness their mother in critical condition.
There was no ultrasound back then, no way to tell if the baby had been injured too. When Jesse was older, she realized it must’ve been hard for them, not knowing if all that radiation would affect her and having to wait those two extra months to find out. When she survived, they called her the Miracle Baby. That was a lot to live up to.
That’s why Jesse decided at age five that she was destined for greatness. Since she’d beaten the odds, she had to do something important in this world to prove that she was worthy and deserving of being here.
After recounting the story, her father said, “But thankfully, you turned out fine.”