Almost Home

Fraser Luesse Valerie

Description

With America's entrance into the Second World War, the town of Blackberry Springs, Alabama, has exploded virtually overnight. Workers from all over are coming south for jobs in Uncle Sam's munitions plants--and they're bringing their pasts with them, right into Dolly Chandler's grand but fading family home turned boardinghouse.An estranged young couple from the Midwest, unemployed professors from Chicago, a widower from Mississippi, a shattered young veteran struggling to heal from the war--they're all hoping Dolly's house will help them find their way back to the lives they left behind. But the house has a past of its own.When tragedy strikes, Dolly's only hope will be the circle of friends under her roof and their ability to discover the truth about what happened to a young bride who lived there a century before.Award-winning and bestselling author Valerie Fraser Luesse breathes life into a cast of unforgettable characters in this complex and compassionate story of hurt and healing.

Sujets

• Alabama

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493416608
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Endorsements
“This is the kind of book you can’t wait to get home and read every night—to meet up with characters you genuinely like in a feels-so-real place you want to be. Almost Home is wholeheartedly engaging and uplifting, sweet and sentimental, but also smart, witty, and brilliantly down-to-earth. Finishing this book is like hugging a good friend goodbye—you don’t want to let her go.”
Sara Peterson , editor in chief, HGTV Magazine
“A story of kindness, friendship, and healing, Almost Home shines. At an Alabama boardinghouse in the 1940s, characters going through troubled times find hope and help through each other.”
Nancy Dorman-Hickson , coauthor of the award-winning Diplomacy and Diamonds and a former editor for Progressive Farmer and Southern Living magazines
“Valerie Fraser Luesse’s Almost Home beautifully depicts that uncertain time in post–World War II America when people from all walks of life were trying to find their way in a world where nothing was the same. Each character contends with their own struggle but learns that when love, compassion, and support are offered, even strangers can turn into family.”
Stephanie Patton , publisher/editor, The Leland Progress
“ A ragtag group of strangers finds commonality and strength under one roof (literally) in Valerie Fraser Luesse’s witty, wise, and moving second novel. Almost Home abundantly reveals how friendship and faith endure in spite of—and sometimes because of— trying times, and how the things that tear us apart can also bring us together.”
Jim Baker , journalist and author of The Empty Glass
Books by Valerie Fraser Luesse
Missing Isaac
Almost Home
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by Valerie F. Luesse
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1660-8
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Dedication
For Missey
Contents
Cover
Endorsements
Books by Valerie Fraser Luesse
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part 1: The Arrival
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part 2: The Return
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Part 3: The Goodbyes
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
Epilogue
A Look at another Valerie Fraser Luesse Story
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
Part 1: The Arrival
April 3, 1944
Dear Violet,
How’s everything over in Georgia? I bet you thought you’d never hear from your big sister again! What with getting the lake ready to open and looking after all my boarders, I’m about half crazy. I told Si that if I don’t soon get a minute to prop my feet up and catch my breath, he might as well run on down to Trimble’s and pick me out a casket.
Did I tell you they’ve gone to selling caskets upstairs at the mercantile? They’ve got big yellow name tags you can tie on the handle once you make your selection. Then you just pay at the register, and that sweet little Gilbert boy that stocks the shelves will haul your purchase to the funeral parlor on a flatbed truck. It’s so much more convenient than driving all the way to Childersburg when a loved one passes, but it’s a little spooky to shop for your dry goods, knowing what’s overhead. And anytime you cross the river bridge, you’re likely to meet a casket bound for the funeral home. How about that? Before we can cross Jordan, we’ve got to cross the Coosa.
I have to tell you, sister, I’ve been sorely missing somebody to talk to since you and Wiley moved away to Georgia. I’ve got people all around me from morning till night, but now and again you just want to have a conversation with somebody that doesn’t need you to fry something, iron something, or mop something up. You got anybody to talk to over in Georgia?
Back to my boarders. Granddaddy Talmadge must be rolling over in his grave. I can hear him now: “Yankee carpetbaggers!” I’m a little ashamed of myself for renting to them, what with his Confederate uniform still hanging in the attic, but we sorely need the money. They say this Depression’s near about over, but I reckon somebody forgot to tell Alabama.
My boarders seem to come and go in cycles. The ones that rented from me at the beginning of the war have all left, and I just filled up with new people. We rented the last of the upstairs rooms a couple of weeks ago, one to a perfectly horrible couple—the Clanahans from Reno, Nevada—and one to a young husband and wife from Illinois, name of Williams. I did NOT show those Reno people our old room—just put them in that drafty back bedroom and saved ours for Mr. and Mrs. Williams when they get here, which ought to be any day now. Something tells me they need it. (Little Mama’s house is talking to me again!)
I’m babbling on and on about nothing, but I sat down here with a purpose, Violet. What with all the comings and goings at home, I’ve decided a thing or two. I think God gives us soul mates—not many but enough to get us through. And I’m not just talking about husbands and wives. I’m talking about those one or two people we meet on life’s journey who see straight through all our nonsense and love us one hundred percent, no matter what. You’re my soul mate, sweet sister. And I never fully appreciated that till now.
Well, I’d best go before I have to reach for that pretty handkerchief you embroidered for me. Some days I hold to it like a lifeline. Hope y’all are still coming for the Fourth. It wouldn’t be a fish fry without my Violet.
Kiss the young’uns for me and give Wiley a hug.
Your loving sister, Dolly
CHAPTER one
Anna Williams leaned out the truck window and let the wind blow her damp auburn hair away from her face. She remembered her grandmother’s parting words: I fear Alabama will suffocate you. With each warm gust of wind, Anna felt a fresh wave of loneliness. The family she had left behind in Illinois seemed a million miles away right now. She had yet to see her new home but already missed the old one so much she could hardly bear it.
“Need to stop?” her husband asked without taking his eyes off the road.
“I’m alright.” She took a sip of the soda he had bought her at a Texaco station just outside of Birmingham. It wasn’t ice-cold anymore, but it was better than nothing. A quick glance in Jesse’s direction told her nothing had changed—not yet, anyway—but she was hoping and praying.
Jesse had what radio newsmen at the front called “the thirty-yard stare”—a vacant, somber gaze. It had settled onto his face like a heavy fog and hovered there for the past year. Even though her husband wasn’t a soldier—flatfeet and hardship had kept him out of the service—he was fighting a battle just the same.
Some men collapse under the weight of a failing farm, but Jesse had stood firm—sadly, for both of them, by turning to stone. Now he had decided that the only way to revive their farm was to leave it behind, at least for a while. He was driving them away from everything and everybody they loved, but Anna was determined not to cry in front of her husband. She had to believe that somewhere deep down, he still had a heart, and she didn’t want to break it by letting him know just how desolate she felt.
She looked out her window and took in the countryside. Alabama was so green —a thousand shades of it. Everywhere you looked were towering pines, their branches thick with needles that faded from deep olive to sage to pale chartreuse at the very tips. With the truck windows down, Anna could occasionally catch the heady fragrance of honeysuckle, which draped the fence lines and mounded so heavily in spots that it threatened to take down the barbed wire and liberate the cows. The lush pastures made a thick carpet of grass that looked like emerald velvet. You couldn’t look at grass like that and smell its perfume without wondering what it would be like to stop the truck, strip off your sweaty clothes, and lie down in a bed of cool, green sweetness. That had to be a sin. And it would likely stampede the livestock.
Anna thought to herself that this Southern landscape didn’t so much roll as billow, like a bedsheet fluttering on a clothesline, as the mountains and foothills of Tennessee sank into flatlands around Huntsville, only to soar up again just above Birmingham. The pickup was headed down a two-lane highway that had carried the couple straight through the Magic City—that’s what the radio announcers called Birmingham, though Anna had no idea why—and now she and Jesse were getting their first glimpse of rural Shelby County, where they would be living for the next couple of years.
“Help me watch for a dirt road off to the right.” Jesse was turning off the Birmingham highway and onto a county blacktop. “It’s supposed to have a sign by it that says ‘Talmadge Loop’ or something like that.”
They drove past several white clapboard churches and what Anna guessed were cotton fields. She spotted a soybean field or two—at least that much was familiar.
“There it is,” she said, pointing to a crooked wooden sign nailed to a fence post.
Jesse followed what did indeed appear to be a big loop—more a half-moon of a road, really, connected to the county highway at each end. It was sprinkled with