Free Miss Julia's Gift: A Penguin Special from Viking by Ann B. Ross Page B

honest as the day was long. He never gave me reason to suspect him of the kind of duplicity that Wesley Lloyd had practiced—that is, telling me one thing and doing . . . well, I won’t specify exactly what he’d been doing, but it resulted in an illegitmate son who now lived under my roof.
    And that was something else that my new husband was doing which my old one would never have tolerated. In fact, Wesley Lloyd would’ve turned me out of house and home if I’d attempted to take in a homeless waif and his unwed mother. But Sam took on my odd and unrelated family as if he’d always been a part of it, and they were delighted with him. So why I was having trouble doing the same, I didn’t know.
    Sam was a gifted man in many ways, as a successful small-town lawyer almost has to be. Even though he’d been retired for a few years, his interest in all things legal—well, in all things human, I should say—had never subsided. He was outgoing, friendly, and, above all, courteous. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word.
    So different, you understand, from Wesley Lloyd, who’d been the owner of one of the few independent banks in the state and who took pleasure in holding the notes on loans of people who borrowed more than they could repay. “They don’t know money, Julia,” he had once said to me, righteously justifying himself. “Which is their hard luck and my good luck because I do.”
    No one would ever have called Wesley Lloyd a gentleman—he’d been much too hard and unbending—although of course he’d had manners and dressed the part. But it was all for show. In his heart he had been a grasping, unfaithful excuse of a husband and of a man.
    And if you think that’s too harsh a judgment, you don’t know the half of it. I was brought up to speak no ill of the dead, as well as to say nothing if I couldn’t say something nice, but if I’d followed those old sayings, I would’ve been constrained to utter silence where Wesley Lloyd was concerned for the rest of my life.
    Barely two weeks after his funeral—which I must say was well attended since many were worried about certain loans that might be called in by the grieving widow—a knock on my door turned my life upside down.
    There had stood a small, blond-headed, bosomy woman—with four-inch heels and five-inch cleavage, both of which shocked me to my core. When I could tear my eyes away from her heavily made-up face, I noticed beside her the little, wispy-haired, freckled-faced boy with glasses sliding down his nose standing there with an ashen look on his face and a Winn-Dixie grocery sack clutched to his chest.
    Well, I don’t want to go over all that again. Suffice it to say that I learned then that Wesley Lloyd had been doing more than making loans for some several years—actually for a decade or so, and specifically what he’d been doing every Thursday night that rolled around when I thought he had meetings at the bank. Those two at my door were the result of his extrafinancial activities.
    I’d turned the tables on him, though, and on the whole, snickering town while I was at it. I took those two in and dared a soul in Abbotsville to criticize me for it. Hazel Marie and Little Lloyd had become my family—not having been blessed with issue in my first marriage, for which I considered myself doubly blessed after I learned of Wesley Lloyd’s breach of his marital vows.
    So that was the family that Sam joined when we were joined in matrimony. And he loved it. He had been a widower much longer than I’d been a widow—said he’d been waiting for me, which I didn’t for a minute believe—and he was lonesome for company. Well, he had plenty of company now—there were Hazel Marie, Little Lloyd, Lillian and Latisha, her little great grand, Mr. Pickens, who was chasing Hazel Marie every chance he got, and me. We were all in and out of the house all day, every day—company enough for any man. Of course, being Sam, he said I was enough