“Nope, I do not smoke, and believe me, I know all the rules, upside down and backwards,” April said. “I never even lit up a cigarette. I gave them away to kids at school. I thought it would make them like me, but it didn’t, so I stopped stealing them.”

Flynn opened the door for the short, thin woman who made April look downright overweight. Her face was just skin stretched over a skeleton. Her hair had been dyed a shade somewhere between orange and red, but gray roots were showing.

“I heard you kids were here. I brought a chocolate cake for you. Lord, I miss Lucy. She was a rock in both of our clubs.” Stella talked as she carried the cake to the dining room table and set it down.

“Thank you so much,” April said.

Stella turned around and stopped in her tracks. “I swear to God, Nessa, you look just like Lucy did when she was thirty years old and we started our garden and quilting clubs. April, darlin’, you look tired. Flynn, you’ve got Matthew’s good looks. That’s not necessarily a good thing.” She fussed with the cake on the table. “Maybe things would have been different if Gabby had lived to finish raising you. I still get weepy when I think of the good Lord taking your mama home to be with the angels at such a young age.” She wiped a tear from her eye, straightened, and then headed toward the door. “I’d love to stay and catch up with you kids, but my sister, Vivien, and I are going to the animal shelter. We volunteer there for a few hours once a week. If y’all need anything, you feel free to call me.” She was gone with a wave before any of them could say a word.

“Did that really happen, or did I dream it?” Nessa shook her head.

“Stella makes the best chocolate cake in the whole world, and there’s one on the table, so I think it was real,” April answered. “Y’all should remember Stella, if not by her face, by her voice. She was here on Wednesday afternoons every single week with Vivien for the quilt-club meetings. There were about six or seven of them, and they would exchange tips and all kinds of patterns in addition to talking about God and repeating church gossip. There’s a file cabinet full of the patterns out there in the shed.”

“When those women came around, I went down to the waterfall,” Flynn admitted. “I didn’t like being around them, and there were always leftover refreshments, so I didn’t figure I was missing anything.”

“I loved listening to their stories,” Nessa said, “and Nanny Lucy would give me scraps from the quilt pieces to play with.”

“Then maybe you should join the quilting club,” April said. “Since the shed is here, they’ll come around asking us if we want to join.”

“Are you going to join?” Nessa asked. “What if they want to use the shed for their projects? I’d hate to join and then be in the middle of a quilt when they needed the frame and space.”

“Nope!” April’s tone left no room for argument. “After we get that job finished in the shed, I don’t care if I never go out there again. I’m going to look for work somewhere around Blossom, though, because I’m tired of running from my problems.”

“And your problems are?” Flynn asked.

“Like you said earlier, I don’t want to talk about it with a couple of strangers, even if we do share DNA,” April told him.

“I can’t wait to get into the filing cabinets, but I don’t think I’d join the club even if they asked me,” Nessa said, responding to April’s earlier suggestion. “I’ve never been much of a joiner in anything. Any club or organization I was allowed to join when I was growing up had to be affiliated with the church, and”—she shrugged—“Daddy didn’t like it, but if I couldn’t be in 4-H at school, then I refused to join the young ladies’ auxiliary at church.”

“And I thought you were an angel.” April smiled.

Nessa shot half a smile toward her and changed the subject. “I’m hoping the mice haven’t been into the fabric cabinet in the garage. We could probably make more than one quilt while we’re here.”

“Whoa!” Flynn put up a palm. “Speak for yourself. If you want to sew every day this summer, then I won’t stand in your way, but darlin’ cousin, when we get the quilt finished that’s in the frame, I’m done.”

“Guess our DNA is a little bit alike.” April almost grinned. “But what do you intend to do to stay busy all summer, or until we get the quilt done? Whichever comes first.” April hung her purse on her shoulder and headed out through the front door this time.

“Rewire this house, put in new electrical outlets, and hang some air conditioners to start with,” Flynn answered as he headed toward Nessa’s SUV. “After that, I’ll either find something to do, or I’ll sit on the porch and listen to the birds sing.”

April opened the door and slid into the back seat. “Or go down to the waterfall and listen to the water rushing over the stones, like I intend to do if I can’t find a job.”

“I love that waterfall, and the time we spent there—except for the last day.” Flynn fastened his seat belt.

“That was the highlight of my visit when we were all here. How could you not like the last day?” Nessa frowned. “That was when Nanny Lucy fixed a picnic and spent the day with us. I always thought it was a perfect ending to the time we got to spend here in Blossom. At the end of that day, Mama either picked me up here or at the café when I got a little older.”

“I liked swimming, but I didn’t like that picnic,” Flynn admitted. “It meant our time here was over, and I had to go back to Dallas to live in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment. I missed the open space and the waterfall, having y’all to talk to even on the days when we bickered and argued. Every time I climbed the steps, I wished I was back here in the country.”

April hadn’t liked the day that her cousins left the place, either. Once a year, in the summer, then maybe again on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas, were the only times she got to be with them, and those were special days for her. She and the cousins might argue and fuss the whole time they were there, but when they were gone, she was all alone for the rest of the summer with only one of the Waylons for company. Just thinking of the loneliness of living out in the country on a dead-end road made her stomach hurt like it had when she was a kid and her cousins left.

In those days, if Nanny Lucy wasn’t packing up patterns and quilt kits to mail off to her customers, she was either sewing up a quilt top in the house or doing the hand-quilting out in the shed. April quickly learned to stay out of her way and to entertain herself.

A vision of Nanny Lucy standing in the middle of the living room came to mind. April had just graduated and had a decision to make about going to college or getting out on her own. It was one of her grandmother’s bad days, when she was mean and hateful.

“You can either live here and commute to college,” Nanny Lucy had told her, “or I’ll give you the amount of money that the first semester would cost me, and you can have what you’ve saved through the years to go with it. But if you take the money, don’t ever ask me for another dime.”

She’d taken the money and blown every bit of it by Christmas. No matter how down and out April had been, Nanny Lucy had stayed true to her word and never offered to help her out again.