Read Online Miss Julia Delivers the Goods by Ann B. Ross - Free Book Online

it’ll only be the three of us who knows. Well, and Hazel Marie, of course.”
    Lillian’s eyes squinched up as she thought it through. “What about Mr. Pickens? He make another one what knows.”
    I shook my head. “No, apparently he doesn’t, and furthermore she doesn’t want him to know. Have you ever heard of such a thing? I can’t get over it.”
    Lillian’s voice dropped low as she asked in wonder, “He don’t know?”
    “No, and I’d think a man of his knowledge and experience would know that when you play with fire you’re likely to get burned. I am very upset with him, Lillian, and I don’t care what Hazel Marie says, he is going to get himself back here and accept his responsibility. This new baby will have a father if it’s the last thing I do.”
    “Oh, he do that, Miss Julia,” Lillian said, nodding her head in complete confidence. “Mr. Pickens, he a fine man an’ he get her married ’fore you know it.”
    “I’m not so sure, Lillian, because there’s another fly in the ointment. I guess I haven’t told you, but Hazel Marie has broken up with him and he’s moving to Charlotte. She made me promise not to call him and says she never wants to see him again. I am just heart-broken over it, especially with a baby on the way.”
    Lillian was rarely speechless, but this time she was. She stared at me with her mouth wide open, then she snapped it shut only to open it again to speak. “You don’t mean it,” she said in utter awe. “Why, that pore little thing don’t know what she doin’. No wonder she sick. Miss Julia, they’s only one thing to do. We got to get Mr. Pickens back here, an’ tell Miss Hazel Marie she don’t have to see him, she jus’ have to marry him.”
    “My feeling, exactly. Be thinking how we can get him here, especially since she made me promise not to call him.”
    “Oh, I already figure that out. I know how to use the telephone, an’ nobody make me promise nothin’.”
    “Lillian,” I said, as a great weight rolled away, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
    “Me, neither,” she said, and we smiled at each other in complete agreement.
    By the time I got to Sam’s house to tell him the news, I’d worked myself into a fiery state over Mr. Pickens’s careless ways. He’d taken advantage of Hazel Marie, then walked off, leaving her with the consequences. The very idea, I fumed, strewing seed hither and yon, then leaving before the harvest. I was not going to have it.
    And Hazel Marie could just get herself off her high horse and walk down the aisle like many another had done before her. Those two had more than themselves to think of, namely Lloyd and the new little bundle of joy or whatever it was. They’d made themselves a family, so now they could just act like one.
    The garage door was closed, so I got out of the car and walked up on the porch, taking care not to slip on the wet leaves that covered the steps. I rang the doorbell, still reluctant to just barge into another woman’s house, even though Sam’s first wife had been dead and buried for longer even than Wesley Lloyd Springer.
    James opened the door and immediately stepped back. “Miss Julia, how you do? Come in, come in an’ dry off. It gettin’ airish out there, don’t you think?”
    “I hadn’t noticed,” I said, walking into the wide entrance hall. “If you’ve finished with the garage, James, you need to get those wet leaves raked off the steps and the walk.”
    “Well, I ain’t ’zactly finished with the garage. They’s still a heap to do in there.”
    “Take time out like you’re doing now and get rid of those leaves. Somebody’s going to fall and break something.” Sam was entirely too lenient with James, who could look at work to be done and never see it. “Is Sam in his office?”
    But just then, Sam opened the door into the hall and my heart lifted as it always did at his welcoming smile. “I thought I heard somebody out here. Come in, Julia, I’m glad