Sadie-In-Waiting Read Online Free PDF Page B

friend banged the heel of her hand against her temple, her face scrunched up on one side. “Something’s wrong. I thought I just heard you use ‘Ed’ and ‘surprise’ in the same sentence.”
    “Oh, ha-ha.” Sadie interrupted her phony laugh with an even more phony yawn.
    When Ed first moved to Wileyville from Michigan to take over the town pharmacy, he’d told everyone he had come South to thaw out. Nearly a quarter of a century later, and despite the fact that in his work he had ministered to them in every conceivable situation known to man and medicine, a lot of folks around town would tell you they still found the man’s demeanor a bit…glacial.
    But they didn’t know him the way Sadie did. They didn’t know the warm and funny, private man who had courted her all those years ago and cared for her all these years since. Their marriage had set tongues wagging all over Wileyville. After all, she had hardly been twenty years old, and Ed more than a decade older, a businessman set in his ways and not from around here .
    “Joke all you want,” Sadie said. “I realize how many people see my husband as not much more than the balding head lowered over their prescriptions at the back of the drugstore. But I know that when he lifts his head and looks up, he still only has eyes for me.”
    “Now, that’s the kind of confidence I like to hear. Go on in there and make him look up.” The shove in the right direction Mary Tate started to give Sadie suddenly turned into a grab at her arm and backward tug. “But let’s not startle the life out of him when he does. Wait here a sec.”
    “What? Why?”
    Her companion had already darted inside. “Not bad, girls, not bad. Now each of you grab a chair and practice taking your seats in unison. Remember, no plunking down like you have rocks in your pockets. Lower yourself to the edge of the seat and perch! ”
    Chair legs scraped over the floorboards.
    Quarrelsome voices rose, then just as quickly fell.
    Mary Tate appeared from the back room dragging behind her a canvas tote on wheels. It thumped and bumped along over the threshold and onto the sidewalk.
    Sadie stared at it. “You plan on moving in with me, the better to do a total makeover?”
    “This? This is just the bare necessities.” The heavy brass zipper ripped open, and Mary Tate began to rummage around inside. “If I ever did put my mind to doing a makeover on you, sweetie, you’d have to clear the driveway and set up a delivery ramp, because I’d haul stuff in by the truckload.”
    “Truckload? Do I really need that much?” Did she have to ask? Anyone paying the least bit of attention could have seen how she had let her appearance slide. And at thirty-nine, she’d already been on a downward slope to begin with.
    She made a quick survey of the woman looking back at her in the window. Hair—blah. Complexion—blah. Outfit, attitude, overall physical condition—blah, blah, blob.
    “Would you look at me?” She leaned forward and pulled her cheeks back with both hands, hoping that might help her look a little less like a basset hound with a sleep disorder. “No wonder when Mayor Furst needed to fill a slot working among the living impaired, he thought of me.”
    “Start the music again, girls, and walk it through from the beginning. I may be a minute,” Mary Tate bellowed. Then she turned and cast a worried gaze at her friend. “Sadie, what in the world are you talking about?”
    “The mayor offered me a job this morning—running the cemetery.”
    “A new job!” She handed Sadie a hairbrush and went to work applying blush in quick decisive strokes. “When do you start?”
    Sadie tamed the worst of her dull tangle of curls down and tossed the brush back into the case. “I don’t.”
    The plastic blush case snapped shut. Mary Tate frowned. “ Why not? ”
    She wished people would quit asking her that. “Because…well, because…did you not hear what I said? He wants me to run the cemetery