Widow's Tears Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bayles
“Herbs and Flowers That Tell a Story”
Pecan Springs Enterprise
    Ruby turned up the car’s air-conditioning another notch and settled back in her seat. It was nearly eleven, and the morning traffic on Highway 290 had all but disappeared. The drive from Pecan Springs to Round Top took only two hours, and the day was glorious. The grass and trees were warmed by the bright spring sun in a clear, blue sky, with only a few storm clouds piled up along the eastern horizon. The bluebonnets had already bloomed and faded, but the roadsides were decorated with cheerfully variegated blankets of blue widow’s tears, purple verbena, burgundy winecups, bright yellow wild mustard, pink phlox, white prickly poppy, yellow-orange coreopsis, and the blossom-cloaked towers of Spanish dagger. Along the grassy median between the eastbound and westbound lanes, clumps of blooming oleander shrubs were shrouded in translucent clouds of pastel pink, red, and white. The radio was playing an old Frank Sinatra song, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and Ruby hummed along.
    As she drove, Ruby thought of what China had said—and what she hadn’t. Ruby knew, of course, what China had been thinking: that it was time she buckled up and stopped mourning for Colin. They hadn’t been married, for crying out loud—she wasn’t a widow. She should learn to love Hark the way Hark loved her. She should get on with her life. And all of it made perfect sense. China was right, as usual, her logic perfectly indisputable.
    Like nobody’s loved you
    Ruby sighed. Except that it didn’t work that way. Her grief for Colin (it didn’t matter that his name was Dan—she would always think of him as Colin) couldn’t be turned on and off like a stupid faucet. Most of the time, she managed to keep it hidden from everyone except China, but it was always there, come rain, come sun, a permanent sadness shadowing herheart. She valued Hark’s affection, and she appreciated his intelligence and his quiet kindness. She even enjoyed the occasional cowboy who found her attractive and sexy and with whom she had a brief and gratifying fling.
    But Colin, dead, was as unrelenting as he had been in life. He haunted her still, just as if they had been married. Cloudy days, sunny days, he was always in her thoughts, a spirit who refused to be exorcised. And until he was gone, there was no room for Hark. Oh, she could pretend, but that’s all it was—just an act.
    A slat-sided cattle truck passed her, an eighteen-wheeler loaded with a half dozen forlorn steers on their way to market, and Ruby slowed to let it move into the right-hand lane ahead of her. There was something else on her mind, something that China had not managed to guess—not yet, anyway. She was wondering whether it might be time to sell the Crystal Cave and her interest in their partnership. She had rejected the idea when it had first tiptoed into her mind, but it had returned, then hung around, and now seemed to be making an attractive nuisance of itself. Maybe, if she moved on to somewhere else, did something else, she could leave Colin’s ghost behind.
    The truth was that, while she liked what she was doing, she had painted herself into a corner. There was simply too much administrative stuff, which was satisfying in its own way but was eating her alive. The irony of this, of course, was that she was the one who had proposed the tearoom and the catering service and had been eager to jump on Cass’ idea for home deliveries of gourmet meals. But while their three-ring circus (as China liked to call it) was still fun and interesting, it simply consumed too much time. She’d had to cut back on her teaching, for instance, which had always given her so much pleasure. When was the last time she had offered an I Ching class?
    And she was neglecting her quilting and yoga and meditation—thingsthat she especially loved to do, that energized her