Free The Ladies of Garrison Gardens by Louise Shaffer

smile and like what I've given you.” But the scrap of hope—and her sucker's brain—kept her driving.
    When she got home, Sara Jayne wasn't there. She knew Laurel was coming home because Laurel had repeated the time and date of her arrival every Friday for a month. But Sara Jayne wasn't there. Laurel's teeth stopped chattering. And she felt a sour little smile spread over her mouth. And in spite of how much a part of her wanted to cry, another bigger part of her was saying
I told you so
.
    As she went through the empty house she thought of all the scenarios for a disastrous Christmas that she'd been imagining on the drive home. The one thing she hadn't anticipated was a no-show. You really had to hand it to her ma.
    Sara Jayne didn't turn up for the next three days. On the morning of the fourth day, December 23, Laurel placed the jewelry box and the card on Sara Jayne's dresser and went back to college to spend the holiday alone in the room she was renting from a third-year biology student.
    Later on, Laurel would piece it together and realize that while she was driving home to Charles Valley, Sara Jayne was getting her diagnosis. And while Laurel sat in the empty little house waiting, Sara Jayne was coping with her terror the only way she knew how. But by the time she figured out the sequence of events, Laurel had already left school, and Sara Jayne was in the hospital, and their new lives centered around bedpans, and IV drips, and finding the right kind of wipes to moisten cracked lips, and new phrases like
pain management
and
do not resuscitate.
    Then came the night when the floor nurse called to say Laurel should get herself back to the hospital immediately. Laurel walked into her mother's darkened room and saw something gleaming on Sara Jayne's arm. The pearls had been twisted around her wrist.
    “The doctor wouldn't let us put them around her neck,” the nurse said. “But she insisted on wearing them, so we made them into a bracelet.” Two hours later, Sara Jayne died.

Chapter Twelve
    T HE NEXT MORNING Laurel got up early, before Li'l Bit and Maggie were awake, and went to Li'l Bit's house. She left the entire mountain of glossy boxes and bags on Li'l Bit's front porch and slipped away.
    For the next few hours she told herself she was not in hiding. She had reading to do. On Tuesday night she was going to have supper with the Garrison lawyer, who was now her lawyer. His name was Stuart Lawrence, Jr., and he had billed the evening that lay ahead of her as a
little chat
. If that wasn't scary enough, his secretary had sent her an autographed copy of the book he'd written and self-published about the resort and the gardens. It sold in the Garrison gift shop for an outrageous sum and it featured a picture of Stuart Junior with his father, Stuart Senior, who had been the Garrison lawyer before him. Clearly, she had to read the book. That was the only reason she was staying home instead of going over to see how Li'l Bit and Maggie were doing, she told herself.
    After forty-five minutes of Junior's clunky prose, she gave up and drove across the highway to Li'l Bit's.
    She heard the music as soon as she started down the driveway. One of Li'l Bit's Italian operas was blasting away, reaching decibel levels that were way beyond the capacity of her old phonograph. Laurel stopped her car and got out as Li'l Bit, who had been sitting on the porch, came down the steps and made a beeline for her.
    “Do you hear how glorious?” she demanded in her high voice. Big loopy melodies swooped through the air. Li'l Bit's face was pink and glowing, and her hair was flying out of its net. “Do you hear how perfect?” Li'l Bit hugged Laurel. “You shouldn't have done it,” she shouted happily above the music, “but I'm so glad you did! I'm such an old stick-in-the-mud, I never would have gotten one of those machines for myself, and just listen!” She stood still, letting the sound wash over her like a dog under a sprinkler on a hot