Free Night Scents by Carla Neggers

would have expected that much courtesy from him. He could hear a booming laugh from the crowd behind the church, but forced himself not to speculate whose it might be. He'd given jobs over the years to people from his hometown, people who still had family there, friends. Irma usually sent them. She never asked him to provide a job, simply had them stop by with a bit of country ham from home, a peach cobbler, a batch of fried apricot pies. Mabel Porter, his new assistant, was one. She was smart, crafty, and maybe as ambitious and jaded as he'd been when he'd first arrived in Nashville.
    A rickety wooden gate opened into a small graveyard where Clate would sometimes hide from his father when he was in a violent, drunken rage. Irma had taken him out once to show him where she would be laid to rest, in a shaded plot between her husband, who'd died in World War II before they'd had any children, and her parents. The visit had been one of her ways of impressing upon her recalcitrant, angry student that life was short and death certain, and he'd best make good use of his time and talents. Irma Bryar had always operated more on gut instinct and example than whatever educational theory was currently in vogue during her long life and career. She did whatever she thought was right, and whatever she thought might work.
    Her grave was covered with fresh dirt, flowers all around, wilting in the strong afternoon sun. Clate could feel the sweat dripping down his temples, matting his shirt to his back. He keenly remembered Irma's disappointment in him when he'd left town before graduating, a disappointment coupled, not incongruously in her own mind, with an uncompromising faith in him. His mother had just died. His father had been too drunk to come to her funeral. There was nothing to keep Clate home. He had no money. Eventually he'd earned his G.E.D. and gone on to college. He seldom returned home. Irma put him on the mailing list for her church newsletter and issued an open invitation for him to stop by her house and have iced tea with her on her porch.
    He hadn't often enough, and now it was too late.
    Wild daisies swayed in the hot breeze over in the small, oak-shaded field that would, in time, provide ground for more graves. Clate walked into the tall grass and picked a handful, their long stems turning his palms green. Bugs that he'd barely have noticed as a kid found him, buzzing in his ears, lighting on his neck, his hair. Ignoring them, he ducked under the low branch of a huge old oak and made his way without thinking, without feeling, to his mother's grave.
    He used to pick wildflowers for her as a small boy, and he could remember, even now, the sense of urgency he'd felt as he scooped up handfuls of daisies, black-eyed Susans, dandelions. He'd wanted to make her happy. It wasn't until years later, long after he'd buried her, after he'd become a wunderkind of Nashville business, that he understood his mother had spent her short life trying to fill an abyss that couldn't be filled, that his flowers were just one more thing that had gone into the void. She couldn't be happy; she wouldn't. There was nothing he or anyone could do.
    "Peace to you, Mama," he whispered, still feeling a stab of that desperate five-year-old who'd wanted, needed, the reassurance that Lucinda Jackson was happy. She'd been just thirty-two when she'd died. Younger than he was now.
    He left her the daisies, went back to Irma Bryar's grave for a final good-bye, then headed out through the gate, across the churchyard, and back into his car.
    He didn't breathe again until he was out of the church parking lot and onto the main road.
    But he couldn't stop himself from glancing in his rearview mirror.
    A man in his early fifties stood at the edge of the graveyard, watching the expensive car head out of town. Clate didn't stop, didn't even slow down, although he knew the man was his father.
    Clate Jackson didn't stay in Nashville for four days as he'd estimated. He