The Strawberry Hearts Diner(75)

“Yes, I would, but Mama, how can I live with all the women in his past comin’ around? Oh. My. Gosh!” She covered her eyes. “Everyone will be talkin’ about it.”

“How you goin’ to handle it?” Vicky asked.

“Well, she’s not goin’ to tuck tail and run,” Jancy answered.

“I’m goin’ to go home and sit on the swing for an hour until I calm down, and then I’ll call Ryder and we’ll have a talk.”

Jancy poked her and whispered, “Makeup sex tonight?”

“Shhh!” Emily shot a dirty look her way. “How are you goin’ to handle it, Jancy? You weren’t real happy with Shane, either.”

“I wasn’t finished. He had no business jerking me away from her like that.” Jancy would do the same thing that Emily planned on doing, but she probably wouldn’t wait a whole hour.

“I thought you were shy.” Emily took her hands away from her eyes. “Where’d you learn to fight like that?”

“Bullies at one of the schools. I came home every day upset, and Mama finally told me to either stop whining or to take care of it. I told her they’d expel me if I started a fight and she said that if they tried, call my daddy.”

“And?” Vicky asked.

“One of those mean girls pushed me into the edge of my locker door and bloodied my nose. When I got finished with her, the principal did have to call my daddy. I didn’t get expelled, though she spent a couple of days at home. She still had two black eyes and a cute little crook in her nose when she came back to school. Everyone left me alone from then on. Nobody was my friend, but they didn’t bully me no more,” Jancy said.

“The many layers of Jancy.” Nettie got out of the van and headed toward the porch.

“I don’t like fightin’, but no one is going to push me around or my friends, either,” Jancy said.

“Or pull you away once you get started?” Emily hit the button to open the wide back doors.

Jancy hopped out of the vehicle and went straight to the bathroom, where she washed her face and picked the leaves from her hair.

Vicky watched her from the doorway. “Hope that black eye is healed by the wedding.”

“At least the bride won’t have a black eye.” She grinned.



As Vicky went on down the hall toward the living room, Jancy’s phone pinged in the pocket of her flowing skirt. When she reached for it, she realized there was a long tear in the gauze, and upon closer inspection, a big hole yawned in the shoulder of the matching bright-orange shirt. If that sorry broad showed up in Pick again, Jancy was going to finish the job she’d started—her favorite outfit was ruined.

“Hello,” she said coldly.

“Guess it’s too early to call?” Shane sounded miserable.

“My skirt and shirt are ruined,” she said.

“And your eye is black.”

“I can see in the mirror.”

“I never knew you had a temper.”

Jancy stripped out of the skirt and shirt and carried them to her bedroom. They weren’t even fixable. She put the phone on speaker and dug out a pair of cutoff jeans and a tank top from the closet. “Shane, I learned a long time ago that people only push you around if you let them. I’ll be over my mad spell in an hour if you want to drop by.”

“Wh-why don’t you come over here?” he said.

“Not tonight, darlin’. I’m not leavin’ Emily.”

“It wasn’t Ryder’s fault,” Shane said.

“Yes, it was. He could have thrown that girl out in the yard.”

She got dressed and fell back on the bed, the adrenaline leaving her body as fast as it had filled her veins. Now she was exhausted. “One hour, Shane. If you want to see me, be here at nine o’clock. I’ll be the one with the black eye on the porch.”

“Can I bring Ryder with me?”

“If Emily says it’s okay. See you then.” She hung up and pulled a letter from the nightstand.

My dearest Jancy,

This isn’t going to be an easy letter to write, because if I don’t get the words just right, you might get the wrong idea. But I want to talk to you about letting people run over you. I have not been a good role model in this area. The time to fix something is when it’s first broken, not when it’s shattered in so many pieces that there’s not enough glue in the world to put it back together again. I love your father, but neither of us has been the type of parent that you deserve. With his wanderlust and my inability to stand up to him, life has not been good to you.

Don’t ever be the bully that those mean girls were to you in Beaumont, Texas, but when someone is ugly, take care of it like you did then. Your daddy was so proud of you that day. He said that you were finally showing a little of his blood. Truth was, I was glad you stood up to that girl, but I worried that you might get a taste for that kind of thing. It would be easy to approach ugly situations with anger, but my advice is not to stand there with empty threats. Just get the job done and kick off the dust. Don’t let your temper define who you are . . .

“But I did just that today, Mama. That bitch made me so mad when she insulted Emily and then pushed me. I’d already hit her before I realized what I was doing, and then I had to keep on or she’d have blacked both my eyes.”