Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mildred went to her reward some years back. The men had talked business and church—they were both elders—and we’d talked housekeeping and church, with a little whispered gossip to spice things up. Wesley Lloyd didn’t approve of gossip.
    Sam always ended the drive with a stop at the Dairy Queen for a chocolate-dipped vanilla soft cone. We all got one, except Wesley Lloyd, who had his in a cup with a spoon. Didn’t want to drip on his three-piece suit. He was careful in everything he did, and at the time I took quiet pride in all his neat peculiarities. Like, for instance, he always stirred his iced tea seventeen exact times—I counted—each time with seventeen little tinks on the bottom of the glass.
    The thing you had to know about Sam Murdoch, though, was not to trust his rumpled appearance and slow-moving ways. There were stories about him around town, like how he’d tell other attorneys from over in Charlotte or Raleigh, “I’m just a country lawyer up here in a country town,” he’d say. And they’d come to Abbotsville for a court case, all patronizing and sure of themselves, until Sam took them on in open court. They’d leave town not knowing what hit them.
    When Sam showed up at my door, his sweat-stained panama in his hands, I knew he’d walked the four blocks from his house. And in August heat, too.
    “Get in here and cool off, Sam,” I said, opening the screenfor him. “I declare, it’s foolish to be walking in this heat. It must be ninety degrees out there.”
    “Pretty warm, Julia,” he said, coming into the living room. “Reckon Lillian’s got any ice tea around?”
    “Yes, and chocolate cake, too, which I don’t suppose you’d refuse. Come on back to the kitchen; I want you to see something out there, anyway.”
    He followed me down the hall and out into the kitchen, settling himself at the table where Lillian and I’d had many a cup of coffee together. It struck me how natural it seemed to ask Sam back there, when it had never occurred to me to sit at that table with Wesley Lloyd. Wesley Lloyd had not been a kitchen kind of man. He’d had his meals in the dining room—“A place for everything, Julia,” he used to tell me, “and everything in its place.”
    Since Lillian was nowhere around, I glanced out the window and saw her outside with Deputy Bates and that child. So I got Sam his iced tea and a slice of cake. Then I sat down across from him and told him about the heavy burden that had been laid upon me that morning.
    He ate and nodded, frowned a few times, and then said, “I’m sorry you had to find out this way, Julia.”
    That took the wind out of my sails. Any lingering hope that Wesley Lloyd’s nefarious activities weren’t widely known went with that wind.
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, wavering between screaming my head off and crying myself sick.
    “That’s not exactly the kind of story to take to a wife,” he said. The pity I heard in his voice nearly broke me in two. “And besides,” he went on, “I didn’t know it for a fact; I just strongly suspected it. Nobody with any sense would come to you with a story based on rumor.”
    “There’re a lot of people in this town without much sense,” I said. “That’s why I’m surprised no one told me, or even hinted at it.”
    “People’re afraid of you, Julia,” he said, his eyes beginning to smile again.
    “Afraid, my foot. How can anybody be afraid of me?”
    “You’re a woman with a strong sense of right and wrong, and you don’t mind telling the difference to anybody who’ll listen.”
    “It’s all a sham,” I whispered, digging out my damp handkerchief. “All I’ve ever done was parrot Wesley Lloyd. I’ve never had a thought or opinion of my own, I realize that now. Maybe if I’d had enough sense to think for myself, I’d have found out about him long before this.
    “I need to know something, Sam. Why in the world didn’t he provide for that woman and her child in some way