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Back Garden Spells Save as PDF
Chapters (24)
  1. Cover
  2. TITLE PAGE
  3. DEDICATION
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. PART ONE HINDSIGHT
  6. CHAPTER 1
  7. CHAPTER 2
  8. CHAPTER 3
  9. CHAPTER 4
  10. CHAPTER 5
  11. CHAPTER 6
  12. PART TWO INSIGHT
  13. CHAPTER 7
  14. CHAPTER 8
  15. CHAPTER 9
  16. CHAPTER 10
  17. CHAPTER 11
  18. CHAPTER 12
  19. CHAPTER 13
  20. PART THREE FORESIGHT
  21. CHAPTER 14
  22. FROM THE WAVERLEY KITCHEN JOURNAL
  23. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  24. COPYRIGHT

Claire felt tears come to her eyes, a joy of birth, of redemption. Somewhere deep inside her, Claire had always known. It had been the source of all her jealousy when they were kids. Sydney had been born here. That was a gift, and this had always been inside Sydney, just waiting for her to embrace it.

“You can’t deny it anymore,” Claire said.

“Deny what?” Sydney asked.

“This is your Waverley magic.”

PART TWO INSIGHT

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CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER

7

Lester Hopkins sat in an aluminum lawn chair under the chestnut tree in his front yard. A ribbon of dust followed a car in the distance, coming up the long driveway to the house next to the dairy.

Lester had come back from his stroke last year with a limp and a corner of his mouth that wouldn’t quite turn up, so he kept a handkerchief handy to wipe away the spittle that collected there. Didn’t want to offend the ladies. He spent a lot of time sitting these days, which he didn’t mind so much. It gave him time to think. Truth be told, he had always looked forward to this time in his life. When he was a boy, his grandfather lived the life of Reilly, his days full of big breakfasts, hunting when he felt like it, sleeping in the afternoons, and picking the banjo in the evenings. That, Lester thought, was the way to live. You even got money in the mail every month, like clockwork. So Lester decided early on that he wanted to grow up and be retired.

But there were a few glitches along the way. He had to work harder than he imagined after his father died when Lester was seventeen, which left him to run the dairy by himself. And he and his wife were blessed with only one son. But his son married a hardworking woman and they all lived there in the house, and his son had a son and everything was all right. But then Lester’s wife got the cancer and his son died in a car accident two years later. Lost and grieving, his daughter-in-law wanted to move to Tuscaloosa, where her sister lived. But Henry, Lester’s grandson, then eleven years old, wanted to stay.

So Lester had known only two things of constant faith: his farm, and Henry.

As the car came closer, Lester heard the screen door bang shut. He turned to see that Henry had come out of the front of the house to see who it was. It was too late for business. The sun was nearly set.

Henry called out, “Are you expecting something, Pap?”

“My ship to come in. But that ain’t it.”