Carolina Moon

April.
    She was already bored with that, too.
    “Everything’s the same around here, day after day, month after month. I swear, it’s a wonder every blessed one of us doesn’t run screaming into the night.”
    “Got yourself a case of ennui, do you, Miss Faith?” Lilah’s rough-as-sandstone voice cruised over the French pronunciation. She used it partly because her grandmother had been Creole, but mostly because it just tickled her.
    “Nothing ever happens around here. Every morning’s the same as the one before, and the whole day stretches out in a long thin line of more nothing.”
    Lilah continued to scrub at the counter. The truth was, she’d had the kitchen tidied up for more than an hour, but she’d known Faith would wander in. She’d been lying in wait.
    “I guess you’re hankering for some activity.” She sent Faith a soft look out of guileless brown eyes. As guile was something Lilah had in spades, this look had taken some practice.
    But she knew her target. She’d looked after Miss Faith since the day the girl had been born—born, Lilah recalled with some affection, wailing and waving bunched fists at the world. Lilah herself had been part of the Lavelle household since her own twentieth year, when she’d been hired on to help with the cleaning while Mrs. Lavelle had been carrying Mr. Cade.
    Her hair had been black then, instead of the salt-and-pepper it was now. Her hips had been a mite more narrow, but she hadn’t let herself go. She’d matured, she liked to think, into a fine figure of a woman.
    Her skin was the color of the dark caramels she melted to coat apples every Halloween. She liked to set it off with a good strong red lipstick, and carried a tube in her apron pocket.
    She’d never married. Not that she hadn’t had the opportunity. Lilah Jackson had had plenty of beaux in her day. And since her day was far from over, she still enjoyed getting herself gussied up to go on the town with a good-looking man.
    But marrying one? Well, that was a different kettle.
    She preferred things just as they were, and that meant having a man come calling at the door and escorting her where she liked to go. If he expected to escort her again, he’d best remember to bring along a nice box of chocolates or some posies, and open doors for her like a gentleman.
    Marry one, and you spent your life picking up after him, watching him fart and scratch and God knew what while you sweated to make the paycheck stretch to keep body and soul together and buy a few pretty things of your own.
    No, this way she had a fine house—as tell the truth and shame the devil, Beaux Reves was as much hers as anyone’s. She’d raised three babies, and grieved her heart sick over the lost one, and had, to her way of thinking, all the benefits of male companions without any of the problems.
    She didn’t mind a good snuggle now and again, either. If the good Lord hadn’t meant for His children to snuggle, he wouldn’t have put the need for it inside them.
    Now, Miss Faith, she mused, was just packed full of needs and had yet to figure out how to meet them without causing herself grief. That meant the girl was equally full of problems. Most of her own making. Some chicks, Lilah knew, just took longer to find their way around the barnyard.
    “Maybe you could take yourself a nice long drive,” Lilah suggested.
    “To where?” Faith sipped her coffee without interest. “Everything looks the same, any direction.”
    Lilah took out her lipstick, touched it up in the chrome reflection of the toaster. “I know what perks me up when I got the blues. A good spurt of shopping.”
    “I suppose.” Faith sighed and toyed with the idea of driving down to Charleston. “Nothing better to do.”
    “That’s fine, then. You go on shopping and brighten up your spirits. Here’s the list.”
    Faith blinked, then stared at the shopping list Lilah waved in front of her face. “Groceries? I’m not going shopping for groceries.”
    “You got nothing better to do, and said so yourself. You make sure those tomatoes are ripe, you hear? And you get the floor cleaner I got written down. The TV commercial made me laugh, and that’s worth giving it a try.”
    She turned back to the sink to rinse her dish rag and had to hold in a cackle at the way her girl’s mouth was hanging open. “Then you go on by the drugstore and get me some of my Oil of Olay, the kind in the jar, not the bottle. And the bath bubbles. The milk-and-honey ones.