Brooke was so angry she didn’t trust herself to speak at first. “Why are you so hateful?” she blurted.
“Me?”
“You. Hateful, cruel, spiteful, ungrateful. How could you treat Shug and Louette the way you did?”
Josephine coughed again. “She had no right—”
“She had every right,” Brooke interjected. “Unlike you, Louette is a good, kindhearted person. She has empathy for others, which is a quality you were seemingly born without. Louette saw that you were suffering, and she tried to do something about it. And for that you fired her and threatened to take away her home? I can’t even deal with you, Josephine.”
Josephine struggled to catch her breath between words. “Louette knows I didn’t mean it.”
“No, she doesn’t. And here’s the irony. It’s not herself she’s concerned about. She’s worried about who’ll take care of you when she and Shug are gone.”
“No… no,” Josephine protested. “I didn’t mean it. I was upset. The doctor wants me to take more pain pills. I don’t want them. They make everything fuzzy. Make me so groggy I can’t think straight. And I need to be able to think.”
She closed her eyes, and Brooke thought she’d drowsed off again.
But Josephine was only gathering strength. “Where is everybody? Did you bring them? I need to see them. Tell them to come here. Right now.”
“No.”
Josephine blinked. “What’s that?”
“I said no. Something you’re not used to hearing. I’m not going to enable your cruelty and bullying. Either you apologize to Louette and take back everything you said to her, including the part about you not giving back the land and homes at Oyster Bluff, or I quit.”
Josephine coughed so violently the dogs jumped from her lap and began barking at Brooke, their mistress’s tormentor.
“That’s blackmail,” she wheezed.
“Sue me,” Brooke said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Louette,” the old woman croaked. She raised her voice. “Louette, damn it! I need you.”
***
Gabe Wynant sat at the table in the kitchen, squeezing lemon into a tall glass of iced tea, surrounded by the women who’d been called to gather on the island. They were all drinking tea and laughing and munching on pale iced cookies from a platter in the center of the table.
Lizzie’s and Marie’s faces were pink with sunburn, and Brooke realized she too had gotten burned during their breakdown on the trip to the island.
“What’s so funny?” Brooke felt like a party crasher. “What’d I miss?”
“Varina was telling us about the first time she tried to bake these cookies,” Gabe said, biting into one, ignoring the crumbs scattering across his shirtfront.
“In a wood-burning stove in their family’s cabin—which didn’t even have electricity until after the war,” Lizzie added. “How is that even possible in the twentieth century?”
“Wouldn’t have made a difference,” Varina said with a chuckle. “This tea cake recipe—my mama had it written down on a piece of paper in her Bible, but I couldn’t read her handwriting too good. Where it said to put in a quarter teaspoon of salt, I did four teaspoons! My daddy said those tea cakes weren’t hardly fit to feed to the hogs.”
Marie broke off a portion of one of the cookies and nibbled at the edge. “These are delicious. I wouldn’t mind having this recipe myself.”
“Louette got all the cooking talent in this family,” Varina said. “I never did learn how.”
“But I thought all Southern women were great cooks,” Lizzie said.
“Not me,” Varina said. “I wanted to be a career girl. My daddy used to fuss that I’d never catch a husband if I couldn’t cook, but I didn’t care.”
“She’s doing good to open a can of soup,” Felicia said fondly.
Gabe cocked his head in the direction of the library. “Louette seems pretty upset. What’s going on?”
