The Oleander Sisters

An emotionally riveting tale of the bonds of family and the power of hope in the sultry Deep South

In 1969, the first footsteps on the moon brighten America with possibilities. But along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a category five storm is brewing, and the Blake sisters of Biloxi are restless for change. Beth “Sis” Blake has always been the caretaker, the dutiful one, with the weight of her family’s happiness—and their secrets—on her shoulders. She dreams of taking off to pursue her own destiny, but not before doing whatever it takes to rescue her sister.

Emily Blake, an unwed mother trying to live down her past, wants the security of marriage for the sake of her five-year-old son, Andy. But secure is the last thing she feels with her new husband. Now she must put aside pride, and trust family to help her find the courage to escape.

With Hurricane Camille stirring up havoc, two sisters—each desperate to break free—begin a remarkable journey where they’ll discover that in the wake of destruction lies new life, unshakable strength and the chance to begin again. Dreams are reborn and the unforgettable force of friendship is revealed in The Oleander Sisters, an extraordinary story of courage, love and sacrifice.

The Oleander Sisters

Elaine Hussey

To the IT Girls, with love, laughter and gratitude.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Reader’s Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with the Author

Extract

Copyright

One

THE DAY NEIL ARMSTRONG walked on the moon marked a summer where anything at all could happen. The brother you’d given up for dead in a war everybody hated could suddenly turn up alive, and the sister you’d protected all her life could finally be getting married. Any other woman would have been happy with the sudden turn of good fortune, but not Sis Blake. She was scared of happiness. Let too much joy seep into your life and you’d soon find yourself hunkered beside twisted wreckage wondering what you did to make everything turn out so wrong.

As if Sis needed any more evidence than her own history to tell her something awful was heading her way, the Amen cobbler cooling in the kitchen at Sweet Mama’s Café gave off the scent of secrets, a spicy smell so sharp it could cut away everything you held dear.

Still, Sis kept her troubled thoughts to herself. There was no sense spoiling things for her sister. Emily was humming as she sliced into the cobbler, serving up hope by the spoonful.

“Eat up, Sis.” Emily’s face was radiant with happiness and heat from the ovens. “It’s the best I’ve ever made.”

Sis forced herself to eat so she wouldn’t be the one who wiped the smile off her sister’s face, and Emily went back to her baking and humming, every now and then glancing out the back café window.

What was she seeing besides a backyard lit up with red and blue Christmas lights, though it was July and so hot in Biloxi the seagulls abandoned the beaches along the Mississippi Sound and pecked at Sweet Mama’s display windows trying to get inside where it was air-conditioned? Was Emily seeing a six-year-old son who needed a daddy? Was she seeing a little boy born out of wedlock and tagged with ugly rumors by a few vicious gossips Sweet Mama had run out of the café with a broom? Or was she seeing what Sis did, an endearing little boy in an outgrown Superman suit who was thriving in a family of women?

Even that worried Sis. Get too complacent and bad luck would hunt you down. The bite of Amen cobbler went down hard and sat in Sis’s stomach like an accusation.

“I’ve gotta get going or I’ll be late.” Glad for an excuse to push aside the cobbler, she hugged her sister, then hurried out the door, climbed into her sturdy black Valiant and headed toward the bus station.

Sis whizzed along the beach road, replaying the evening two weeks earlier when Emily had walked into Sweet Mama’s Café on the arm of a stranger and announced, “This is the man I’m going to marry.” Then she’d gone to every table and booth to show off her engagement ring, a stone so big it was bound to be a cubic zirconia.

Many of the diners were regulars who had watched Emily grow up, mostly at the café, shielded by the wide skirts and fierce heart of Sweet Mama. They knew how Mark Jones had gotten her pregnant, then run off to join the army to get out of marrying her, and they were happy she’d finally found somebody who would love her back.

Sis tried to be, too, but she was not the kind of woman to be swept off her feet. Emily’s fiancé was handsome in the too-slick way that made her skin crawl. Every time Sis glanced at him, he was checking his reflection in the Coca-Cola mirror behind Sweet Mama’s soda fountain.

Still, Emily had obviously seen something in her fiancé that Sis missed, so she’d trotted over to her future brother-in-law, determined to learn more about him.

“Larry, I guess you already know I’m the watchdog of the family.”

“You don’t do yourself justice, Sis.” His smile was wide and easy, this pharmaceutical salesman named Larry Chastain, who had swept Emily off her feet six weeks earlier when she’d gone to Walgreens to get some Pepto-Bismol for Andy’s upset stomach. “I’d call you Emily’s guardian angel.”

He oozed sincerity, and in spite of her reservations, Sis found herself smiling back.

“Tell me about yourself, Larry.”

“Ah, the dreaded inquisition.”

His smile was still in place, but Sis thought she’d seen a flash of irritation. Or maybe she was just looking for reasons to keep her trusting sister from racing to the altar with the wrong man.

“I’m blunt, Larry. Maybe too blunt. But I need to know my baby sister is going to be in good hands.”

“I love your sister and make more than enough money to give her and Andy everything they want and need. Emily tells me you’re a worrier, but rest assured, you have nothing to worry about, Sis.”

Emily had walked up then and whisked him off to the kitchen to meet Beulah. It wasn’t until they’d gone that Sis realized Larry Chastain hadn’t told her one single thing about himself. She stood there looking down at the floor as if she expected to see a greasy spot where he’d been standing.

What was it about Larry that set her on edge? Sis hadn’t been able to put her finger on the cause during that meeting two weeks ago, but driving along the beach road to pick up a brother who had received a Purple Heart, she wondered how Larry had managed to avoid the draft. The very idea of a draft dodger in a patriotic family where the men had served and sacrificed for their country made her want to snatch Emily up and run.

By the time Sis parked her Valiant at the bus station, she had to deep breathe in order to collect herself. It wouldn’t do for her brother to see her in this shape. She adjusted the rearview mirror in the off chance her reflection would show some magical transformation. Unfortunately, there she was—plain and chubby with a perpetual worry line creasing her forehead, and hair so curly it always looked like it had been styled by an eggbeater. Still, she tried to pat it into place, and even dug around in her purse to see if she could find a tube of lipstick, as if a little slash of red could turn back the clock. It had been two long years since she’d seen her brother, and she liked to think the sight of her would remind him of catching fireflies on summer nights and fishing off the pier and playing baseball in the backyard.

She turned up nothing in her purse but a wallet, a wad of tissue, two pieces of bubble gum and the stub of a pencil. Sighing, she pinched her cheeks, bit her lower lip to add some color and then put on a smile she hoped would make her look like a woman who had everything in the world she’d ever wanted.

As she stepped out of the car, Sis held out hope that her brother would be the one to turn her hornet’s nest of worry into something manageable, a funny story they’d all laugh at a dozen years from now when Andy was graduating from high school and Emily was baking a celebration cake at Sweet Mama’s. But Jim was leaning against the wall on his crutch, blowing smoke from a Lucky Strike into the humid evening air, his face as closed as a fist.

“Jim. Oh, my God, Jim!”

“Sis,” was all he said, and when she wrapped her arms around him, she understood that’s all he could manage. His flesh had vanished from his bones, and with it the buoyant spirit that used to radiate from him in waves that made him almost hot to the touch.

Without another word, she led him to her car and headed back to the café. He stared at the Gulf as they barreled down Highway 90, the breeze from his rolled-down window blowing his yellow hair straight back from eyes turned as glassy and unseeing as the blue china plate Sweet Mama had picked to serve his welcome-home cake. Sis’s hope flew right out the window. She imagined it sailing across the water like the favorite kite she’d loved and lost when she was six years old, before Emily and Jim were born, before their pink Victorian house across from the seawall became a place where a little girl had to grow up too fast.

“Jim, I know it must have been awful for you over there.”

He didn’t say a word, and who could blame him? Awful could hardly begin to describe it. The prosthetic leg he’d tossed into the car along with his duffel bag was a testament to the horrors he’d endured.

“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener.”

“Give it a rest, Sis. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s okay. Maybe some other time.”

That didn’t seem likely. As she turned her attention to the radio, Sis tried to keep her despair from showing. She found a station where Elvis Presley was crooning “If I Can Dream.”

Were there any dreams left in that car? Sis quickly switched to a station that wouldn’t remind both of them of all they’d lost.

“You won’t believe how Andy’s grown. And Sweet Mama’s still feisty as ever. She wanted to invite everybody in town to your homecoming, but I finally talked some sense into her. I thought it would be easier for you with just family.”

Jim turned her way with a shut-down face full of sharp angles and shadows, then swiveled toward the window to stare at the water. Was he watching the whitecaps? Remembering Vietnam? Wishing on the moon?

“Do you want to hear about Emily’s fiancé?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, you ought to. He’s a jackass.”

“They run the world.”

“Not my world, not while I have breath.”

Sis had been taking care of her family since she was fourteen and that awful accident took their parents. She didn’t plan on stopping just because Emily was trying to outrun her past by racing toward the altar. And maybe that was Sis’s fault. She’d always encouraged her baby sister to be the fairy princess in a fairy-tale world.

Sis took a sharp left in order to avoid Keesler Air Force Base. No sense giving Jim any reminders that the military had mowed the Blake family men down like ninepins, leaving only him behind to pick up the slack. Not that Sis held out any high hopes of that happening. A man who wouldn’t even carry on a conversation about his family was as likely to see after their welfare as Sis was to have somebody stop her in the street and tell her she was beautiful.

Just look at the pair of them. She was an old sourpuss and Jim was still in the killing jungles somewhere on the other side of the world.

It was a pure relief to see the café, a fine, old building of moss-covered brick, reflecting the style of the Gulf Coast’s Spanish history, shaded by a couple of hundred-year-old live oaks and lit up like a rocket ship on blast off. Christmas lights and silver tinsel circled the plate-glass windows where gold lettering proclaimed Sweet Mama’s Café, and underneath in red was etched Home of the Famous Amen Cobbler!

Beyond the front window was Sweet Mama with her coronet of silver braids and a pearl brooch on her green linen dress, laughing at something Emily had said. That was a talent Emily had—making her grandmother laugh, making everybody around her smile. Everybody except Sis, who hadn’t found much to smile about since she discovered she hated the idea of spending the rest of her life selling pies, Amen or otherwise.

The flush on Emily’s cheeks could have been excitement or summer heat. With blond curls escaping from her ponytail, she looked sixteen. A strap of her yellow sundress had slid off one shoulder, and the blue apron she still wore was dusted with flour. Even disheveled, Emily was beautiful.

Sis would never be beautiful, with or without a dusting of flour. She would never look sixteen, even if she could get her frizzy brown bob into a ponytail. She would never be the kind of woman men wanted to sweep off her feet.

Envy ambushed her, so unexpected she almost crashed her car into a live oak.

“Watch out!” Jim grabbed for the steering wheel, but Sis slapped his hands away.

“I’ve got it. I’m just excited, is all.”

How could you envy the sister you’d dressed and fed and soothed at night with silly, made-up stories so she’d sleep with the lights off?

Perhaps it wasn’t envy but longing fueled by the perspective of age. How could Sis have known at fourteen that once you set out on a path, it can take you so far from your dreams you’ll end up at the age of thirty-four not even remembering who you once wanted to be?

She’d given up everything for her family, even her name. Beth. Nobody called her that anymore. Everybody just called her Sis, as if she were nothing more than the role she played.

The sign on the door of Sweet Mama’s read Closed for a Private Party. There was nothing private about it, of course. Tomorrow, word would be all over town. Sweet Mama would tell the breakfast regulars, and Emily was too gentle to refuse details to anybody who asked. By ten o’clock, everybody in Biloxi would know that Sweet Mama had made Jim’s favorite red velvet cake, and Emily had forgotten to take off her apron and Jim had refused to wear his leg.

There it lay on the backseat of Sis’s Valiant, another piece of sand in her craw. What do you say to a brother just returning from the hell of Vietnam? Why don’t you let me strap on your prosthetic leg so you’ll look normal and Emily won’t cry? Or do you just stand there with sand drifting into your sandals while Emily races out the front door, already crying before she gets close enough to hug her twin, the Gulf breeze blowing both of them sideways?

Maybe the Gulf was blowing all of them sideways, and had been for so long Sis didn’t know what normal was anymore. She thought about a brother coming home broken and a sister smiling as she raced toward disaster. She thought about a life gone so far off track she didn’t even remember the direction she’d been going.

Best not to think too far into the future, to simply put one sandy sandal in front of the other until she was standing in Sweet Mama’s, surrounded by the smells of cake and pie and fried chicken and freshly cut tomatoes from Sweet Mama’s prize crop, just standing there silent, gnawing on a chicken leg and watching over her brother and sister as she always had; watching as Emily laughed through her tears and Jim was engulfed by the ones who loved him best and would love him always, even if he never got his mind back from Vietnam and his leg out of Sis’s car.

“Aunt Sis! Aunt Sis!”

The TV perched on the edge of the serving bar was blaring wide-open. Andy sat so close he was crossing his eyes to see.

“C’mon over! They gonna land on the moon!”

For two cents Sis would get on that rocket ship with the astronauts. And she wouldn’t care whether she found the moon or not. All she wanted was to be as far away from her current life as she could get.

* * *

Sweet Mama was relieved when Sis quit glaring over her fried chicken leg at What’s His Name and walked over to join Andy at the TV. Why, from the look on her face you’d think What’s His Name was a fly set to land on Jim’s celebration cake and Sis was a flyswatter.

Larry Chastain. That was the name of Emily’s new fiancé. Sweet Mama would write it down this very minute if she thought she could do it without getting caught. But Emily might see her and start worrying all over again about her forgetfulness. And Sis was bound to notice. That girl didn’t miss a thing. And she wouldn’t stop at calling Sweet Mama forgetful, either. She’d use the scary words senile and hardening of the arteries and dementia.

“Larry Chastain.” Sweet Mama mumbled his name, hoping it would make a lasting impression. If she forgot and called him Gary, everybody would look at her funny. And her older son Steve, the one who wasn’t dead and wasn’t Emily and Sis and Jim’s father, would start that silly talk again about signing over power of attorney.

Sweet Mama would rather be six feet under than sign over any damned thing. She’d built this place from scratch and had run it for nearly fifty years and she wasn’t about to let somebody else take over now, especially her son Steve, who only came to the café when his bossy wife allowed. Besides that, he hated pie. What God-respecting man hated pie? No sirree, Bob. If anybody took over Sweet Mama’s Café, it would be the Blake girls. Emily could make an Amen cobbler the customers couldn’t tell from Sweet Mama’s, and Sis knew more about running a business than any man Sweet Mama ever saw.

If her mind ever did go, God forbid, she’d have her granddaughters running the show and not somebody with a power of attorney, thank you very much.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sweet Mama saw Emily motioning to her fiancé to go on over and join Sis and Andy at the TV, trying to communicate with gesture and smile, as she always had, that everything was all right.

Lord God, Sweet Mama hoped so. The scent of sun-ripened peaches coming from the Amen cobbler was so sweet, if you squinted you could see bees buzzing around the crust. Sweet Mama couldn’t recall what that was a sign of, but she knew it was a harbinger of something that made her bones feel heavy. She closed her eyes, just for a minute, and as clear as a summer day she saw a swarm of bees streaking down from the mimosa tree in the backyard, aiming straight for her head. She lifted her shovel to fight them back.

“Sweet Mama.” Her granddaughter’s voice drifted through the fog. “Sweet Mama. Wake up.”

Emily was shaking her shoulder, and when she looked up at her granddaughter, it came as a great surprise that she was all grown-up instead of four years old. Momentarily panicked, Sweet Mama looked around for Sis, who was no longer fourteen, but a rather unstylish and pensive-looking woman past thirty.

“Are you all right, Sweet Mama?”

“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I thought you’d fallen asleep.”

“In the middle of my own grandson’s homecoming party?” Sweet Mama checked for the cake to be sure she was right. “I should say not!”

Emily sat down beside her and started patting her hand. Sweet Mama was torn between snatching it away, acting all huffy that her youngest granddaughter was treating her like an old woman and leaning into her to enjoy the petting. If you’d told her ten years ago she’d ever get to the age that she needed somebody treating her like a child, she’d have slapped you silly.

Before she could make up her mind which way to act, Gary came over and interrupted the whole thing.

“Larry, darling,” Emily said, and Sweet Mama thought about her narrow escape. She’d come within a gnat’s hair of calling him the wrong name. “I thought you were going to join Andy and Sis.”

“Your sister doesn’t seem to like me.”

“Nonsense, darling. You have to know Sis. She’s just protective, that’s all.” Emily patted him on the arm. “Go on over there now, and don’t spare your charm.”

He trotted off and Sweet Mama said, “Charm, my ass.”

“Sweet Mama! What a thing to say!”

She knew it was a terrible thing to say, but she wasn’t about to admit that it had just slipped out. To make up for the many ways she was now failing Emily, she was going to give her granddaughter the best wedding the Mississippi Gulf Coast had ever seen.

Sis was another thing—as tough and unbending as the live oaks that dripped with Spanish moss in front of the café. Sometimes Sweet Mama wished her oldest granddaughter would bend a little. She wished she wouldn’t be so hard on people. And the way she dressed...Lord God, the more Sweet Mama tried to talk her out of wearing khaki slacks and black blouses all the time, short sleeves in the summer, long in the winter, the more Sis resisted.

Still, Sweet Mama knew Sis would make sure her sister got a wedding grand enough to make up for all those years wondering if Mark Jones would have changed his mind and married her if he’d made it back from Vietnam.

More and more, Sweet Mama depended on Sis to take care of the family. Any day now, she might retire and travel to some of the places she’d read about in National Geographic. She’d always wanted to, and now could be her big chance.

“I think I’ll head to Pikes Peak first,” she said.

“What?” The funny look Emily gave her said she’d done it again, gone off and said something that didn’t have a thing to do with the conversation at hand.

She racked her brain trying to figure out what the latest subject had been. Emily was now looking alarmed.

She had to say something that made sense or Emily would tell Sis, and Sis would fetch Doctor...what was his name? He was an old fart. That’s all she knew.

“You said you were going to Pikes Peak, Sweet Mama.”

“Not this very minute, silly. But I’m getting so old, I’m liable to kick the bucket any day, and wouldn’t it be nice to be up so high I could see Heaven?”

“I don’t think you can see Heaven from Pikes Peak.”

“I was just kidding.”

Feeling backed into a corner, Sweet Mama looked around for a means of escape. And there was her poor grandson, leaning against the wall as if he could no longer see his place in the family.

“Help me up, Emily, and let’s take your brother some of that Amen cobbler.”

Food, that’s all Sweet Mama could remember anymore. She watched as Emily scooped up a big helping and then put a smile on her face as she carried it to Jim.

Sweet Mama got that heaviness in her bones again, an uncomfortable feeling that could be anything from old age to angels whispering in her ear. If she could just ground herself in the café, she’d be all right.