Fired From His Shed, I Married His Brother and Became His Landlord novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cobbler Pan
At the first-shake barbecue Waylon introduces the Peach Queen as his fiancee, Royce says a girl like Susie packs for a family and never marries into one, and Susie puts the cobbler in the Queen's hands and asks Jesse to marry her before the probate court closes.
Waylon had his arm around my waist when he told two hundred people he was marrying somebody else.
I was standing on the flatbed trailer he used for a stage, holding a pan of cobbler he had asked me to bake.
The pecan shakers had started that morning.
His family was feeding half the county on the loading dock to celebrate.
"Y'all know Miss Sutton," Waylon said into the microphone. "She graded for us all summer."
Then he took his arm away and looked at the steps behind me.
A girl in a white dress and a gold pageant sash came up them carrying a bouquet.
"This is my fiancee," Waylon said. "We're getting married the first Saturday of December."
The whole crowd clapped.
I had been with him ten weeks.
On Tuesday, in his truck, he had told me I was the best thing that happened to him all year.
His father took the microphone next.
He owned the shed, the trucks and the dock we stood beside.
He called every woman on his line "Miss," and never once by her name.
"I want to thank Miss Sutton for a good season," he said.
He held out a white envelope.
"Last check. Verna will walk you to the gate."
A few people laughed.
"A girl like that packs for a family," he said, and he smiled at his son and the Queen. "She doesn't marry into one."
The cobbler pan was hot against my wrists.
Under that trailer, under the dock, under the whole long tin shed behind it, lay twelve acres of ground my grandfather had owned.
I owned it now.
Nobody on that lot knew, because I had never told a soul.
The name Pettigrew was printed on every rate sheet in two counties.
I had wanted one summer of hearing what people said about my family when they thought no Pettigrew was listening.
I could have ended the whole party with one sentence.
I didn't want to be believed on the strength of a deed.
I wanted somebody to pick me for nothing at all.
So I walked across the trailer and put the cobbler in the Peach Queen's hands.
"Congratulations," I said. "Mind the pan, it's hot."
She took it because she didn't know what else to do.
I took the envelope out of his father's hand and put it in my back pocket without opening it.
Then I went down the steps and across the dock to the grill.
The man standing there with a pair of tongs was Waylon's older brother, Jesse.
He was the only person on that dock who had not clapped.
He had said maybe forty words to me all summer, and thirty of them were about rain.
Once he had asked what I was reading on the tailgate at lunch.
I told him it was the best thing I ever read.
He said, "Huh," and went to eat on the other side of the dock.
Now I stopped in front of him, close enough to smell the smoke in his shirt.
"Jesse," I said. "The probate court in Fort Valley closes at five. It's ten after four."
He looked down at me.
He was six foot three and sunburned to the collar, and his gray eyes did not move off my face.
"I need a husband," I said. "You're the only one of them I never caught lying."
"Susie," he said.
It was the first time he had ever said my name.
"Will you marry me?"
Behind me the microphone squealed.
"Susie, don't make this ugly," Waylon called.
"Jesse," their father said. "Put those down."
Jesse looked down at the tongs in his hand.
He laid them on the rack.
He untied the apron, folded it in half and set it on the table.
"Boy, you walk off this lot with her, you're done," Royce Tankersley said. "No foreman's truck, no job, no seat at my table."
"Yes, sir," Jesse said. "I know."
He held out his hand to me, palm up, his knuckles scarred white.
I put mine in it.
His fingers closed around mine, hot and rough from the grill, and he did not let go.
I walked the length of that loading dock in front of two hundred people with Jesse Tankersley's hand in mine.
I did not look back at the trailer once.
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