“I’m fine. The bookstore is going well. Selling books, cake, tea, Mom’s political bouquets, Aunt Camellia’s lotions and potions. . . did you know she named one lotion Titillate and Fornicate? And I’m still selling Aunt Iris’s flower photographs and cards that you can’t quite figure out and can’t quite look away from that have a seductive and sexual overcast to them. Who knew flowers could look like that?”

“And your fortune telling?”

That’s what she called my premonitions. She’s called them that since we were kids. As a kid, that’s how she could describe it, and it stuck. “They’re not that bad lately.” That was a lie. But why burden her?

She smiled. “I love you so much, Evie. You’re not only my love-sister, you’re my bestie best friend ever in the world.”

“I love you, too, Jules.” I gave her a hug. “I’m going to look so hot in my maid of honor dress.”

She laughed. “Roarin’ hot! Wait until Marco sees you!”

I almost blushed. Dang, I am too old to blush, but I almost did.

“You’re blushing.” She laughed again.

Then I cried about Marco and she knew, as my mother and aunts knew, why I was crying and what I’d seen in the future for us, so she cried, too, in sisterhood.

“I’m sorry, Evie,” she sobbed. “So sorry.”

“Me too.”

* * *

Later that night my mother, aunts, Jules, and I went to one of only two bars in North Sound. My mother and aunts climbed up on the bar and warbled and sang karaoke. They sang Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” and Aretha Franklin’s “Think.”

Then Jules got up with the band and burned the place down. She plays guitar. And she sings. She and Mack have their own band and do well locally. I mean, how cool can a sister get? She rides motorcycles, she designs stuff for motorcycles, and she plays in a band and skydives!

I should hate her, I should.

But I can’t, so I don’t.

I cheered along with everyone else when she was on her knees, strumming away and singing at the top of her lungs.

* * *

The Book Babes were back. They bought coffee and southern pecan praline cake.

They had read a book about a woman who made fantastical wood chairs with wings and dragons, giant teacups and pink crows, Picasso-style angles and jellyfish shapes.

They decided to draw the chairs they would create if they were painters and carpenters and they described why they made the chair they did.