He talked of the future so easily. The images from him were so vivid. But she couldn’t start this, because then it would end. Stories like this always ended. She couldn’t take this pleasure, because she would spend the rest of her life missing it, hurting from it.

“Leave me alone, Tyler,” she said as he pushed himself away from the van, his chest still rising and falling rapidly. “This never should have happened. And it’s not going to happen again.”

She got in the van and sped away, jumping curbs and running stop signs all the way home.

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER

9

More than a century ago, Waverleys were wealthy, respected people in town. When they lost their money on a series of bad investments, the Clarks were secretly overjoyed. The Clarks were wealthy landowners, with acres full of the best cotton and the sweetest peaches. The Waverleys weren’t nearly as wealthy, but they were mysterious old money from down in Charleston who built a showy house in Bascom and always held themselves better than the Clarks thought they should.

When news of the Waverleys’ poverty reached them, the Clark women danced a little dance in the secretive light of the half-moon. Then, thinking themselves quite charitable, they brought the Waverleys woolen scarves riddled with moth holes and tasteless cakes made without sugar. They secretly just wanted to see how badly the floor needed polishing without the servants and how empty the rooms looked with most of the furniture gone.

It was Emma Clark’s great-great-great-aunt Reecey who took the apples from the backyard, and that started the whole thing. The Waverley women, their clothing mended and their hair messy from trying to put it up without maids, wanted to show the Clarks their flowers, because tending the garden was the only thing they really had any success doing themselves. It made Reecey Clark jealous, because the Clarks’ garden could never compare. There were many apples around the garden, shiny and perfect, so she secretly filled her pockets and her reticule. She even stuffed some down her jacket. Why should the Waverleys have so many beautiful apples, apples they didn’t even eat? And it was almost as if the apple tree wanted her to have them, the way they would roll to a stop at her feet.

When she got home, she took the apples to the cook and told her to make apple butter. For weeks after, every single one of the Clark women saw such wonderful and erotic things that they began to get up earlier and earlier each morning just for breakfast. The biggest events in the lives of Clark women, it turned out, always involved sex, which could have come as no surprise to their frequently exhausted husbands, who spent and forgave too much because of this.