Free Love Lifted Me by Sara Evans

believing true love has chosen you. On your wedding day, you walk down the aisle toward your handsome groom, tall and resplendent in his hand-tailored tux, heart exploding with so much joy, love, and excitement you can barely draw a deep breath.”
    â€œJune, give me the megaphone.” Jade tried to snatch it but her tennisplaying mother-in-law was too quick. She ran around to the other side of the cart. The crowd shifted with her.
    â€œThen it happens. Kaboom. Lies, cheating, lust; the destroyers of all dreams. I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen”—June pointed to the crowd, an evangelist for the lovelorn—“there is no such thing as true love, or fidelity. No such thing as ’til death do you part. Oh no, parting is the death. Only trouble is, the man still lives, kicking and breathing, reminding you every day that forty-one years of your life were given to the wrong man. What then? Some of y’all know what I’m talking about. Liam Lowe, you been married, what, four times? And you, Beth Trout, you must have had two, maybe three affairs. Was your marriage worth a dalliance into adultery?”
    Several onlookers gasped. Some laughed.
    â€œThat’s right. It’s shocking. It happened to my own daughter-in-law, right, Jade? Thought she married a faithful man, a true man.”
    â€œJune, stop.” Embarrassment burned down Jade’s middle. “Why are you doing this?”
    June lowered the megaphone. “Because I’m sick and tired of lies and secrets.”
    â€œYou’ve lived with them for forty years. What’s changed?”
    â€œMe.”
    June had caught Rebel with another woman back in the spring, about the same time Jade discovered Max had a son. Together, the two of them drove Mama back to Prairie City in a ’66 convertible Cadillac. Pink. A few days later Reb flew to see her in the company jet and pledged to change his ways.
    â€œJune, you’re a classy, cultured lady. This is beneath you.”
    June eyed Jade with a hard optic rebuttal and jammed the megaphone to her lips. “It’s time to take life by the reins. Don’t let life rein you.”
    Jade flattened her hand over the megaphone speaker. “So you’re throwing his stuff in the streets and calling out his mistresses?” Not that Reb didn’t deserve it.
    â€œI’m sixty-four years old, Jade. I’m through with pretending. Everyone in this town is hurting, hiding, thinking no one knows the things they’ve done.
    Well I do and I’m putting it all out there.” June jerked away from Jade and went back to the megaphone. “Did y’all know my son had a baby outside his marriage? Sure did. And Jade here had an abortion when she was sixteen. Now she can’t get pregnant to save her—”
    Jade lunged at her mother-in-law, shoving her into the golf cart, stumbling and tripping, and pinned her against the seat. “You blast your business if you want, but you don’t blast mine.” Hard, passionate words.
    The woman had lost her mind. Lost. Her. Mind. Jade yanked the megaphone from June’s tan, slender, bejeweled hand. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”
    â€œOh, Jade.” Her laugh was weak. “I’ve been a spectacle for a long, long time. Only today, I’m in on it. Now let me up.” June righted herself, fixing her hair and smoothing her hand over her tennis top. Her congregation started to dwindle.
    Jade spotted Chandler Doolittle from the Whisper Hollow News , a weekly paper, creeping along the back of the crowd with his camera.
    â€œChandler’s here, June.”
    â€œOh good, he got my message.” June stretched to see him, smiling when she did, and waved.
    Jade ran around to the wheel and hopped into the cart before June got out. She released the brake and mashed the gas. “Hang on, June.”
    â€œWait, did Chandler get my picture? Woohoo,