Free Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County by Amy Hill Hearth

read. This was how Priscilla came to know about Jackie’s book club, which met at the library. She had just finished high school and was working as a maid for mean old Mrs. Burnside.Then she let everyone down by getting pregnant, a disaster that Dolores understood only too well. White girls who were poor like Dolores were in the same boat as colored girls. All it took was one mistake and that was the end of your dreams, assuming you had any in the first place. Meanwhile, white girls who came from money simply disappeared for a while, came back home, and were allowed to act like nothing had happened. They’d been taken out of state—“gone to Georgia” was the phrase—to bide their time at a maternity home, and their babies given away to a well-to-do Protestant couple, or sometimes kinfolk.
    As for the young man or boy who helped create the heartbreaking situation, he usually got off scot-free. Once in a while, some irate daddy would insist on a shotgun wedding—marry my daughter or else. But the better off the family, the more likely they were to try to hide the girl’s mistake.
    Much as Dolores disliked Jackie Hart, there was a small part of her that admired her for figuring out a way to help Priscilla. But Dolores felt something else, too: a flash of envy. No one had helped her, back in her time of need and confusion.
    Now she found herself in trouble again—a different set of circumstances, of course, and yet familiar in the way it made her feel. Once again, she was treated as a person who didn’t matter, who had no say. Once again, the world wanted to take what she had and give her nothing in return. She was forty-seven years old and all used up; some of it was her own fault, some wasn’t. Regardless, all she really wanted was peace. Was that so much to ask?
    This is why she had to fight to protect the river. For herself and her way of life, yes, but it was more than that. This place—the ’Glades—felt eternal. In its own way, it was sacred, like the Grand Canyon, or that place in California with the giant trees.
    Unfortunately, since the ’Glades featured gators, snakes, bugs, and poisonous plants, folks didn’t always recognize its beauty. Outsiders seemed to think it was a wasteland. If that was where your people were from, you got used to strangers acting like you crawled up out of the swamp yourself. You felt cursed being born there.
    Only once had she heard anyone say anything nice about the ’Glades, and it had stuck with her. Her family was not churchgoers. But once, curious as a cat, she’d sneaked over and hid in the bushes near the tent revival at the Colored Adventist Church, just to have a listen. At the end of the service, the preacher gave thanks “for the ’Glades and the life that sprang from it.” This got her attention. “We sometimes don’t appreciate this here swamp,” he’d said, “and we be skeert at some of the things that live in it and around it. It ain’t an easy place to live. But thank you, Lord. The swamp be worthy because you designed it, Lord. You put the swamp here at the same time you hung the sun in the sky, and for this we are grateful, Lord.”
    She memorized those words and they came to her often over the years. This was not a wasteland. Far from it. She would fight for the little night heron, the mangrove trees, the flowing water, and the wild grasses. Surely, the river had a right to survive.

Nine
    H ere, read this while I drive,” Jackie instructed, and I was only too happy to oblige since her driving style, which never seemed to include both hands on the wheel, often made me wish I’d stayed at home in the company of my turtles.
    Judd had drawn his map on the back of a piece of paper he must’ve torn from a school notebook. On one side was a to-do list that included “Mow Miss Turnipseed’s lawn,” “Ask Dad: bike tire,” “Fishing