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Overview
Maggie Sweet has had it! For nineteen years, she's kept house, raised a pair of battling twin daughters, put up with her frugal husband, Steven, humored his impossible mother, and kept her mouth shut. But when Steven spends their life savings on a cemetery plot, it's time for Maggie to take control.
With her twenty-year high school reunion just around the corner and her long-lost high school boyfriend back in town, it's Maggie's turn to start turning heads. In the face of small-minded gossips, a surly family, and a meddling grandmother, Maggie must reach deep inside her Southern-housewife soul to become the woman she's always wanted to be.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061747199 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Sales rank: | 982,794 |
| File size: | 594 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
ATTENTION: "Aunt Sally Cares"
The Daily Ripple
Barium Springs, North Carolina
Dear Aunt Sally,
This is the first time I ever wrote to anyone for advice, but I have studied and studied, and I swear I don't know what else to do. Last night at supper my husband announced that he had taken our entire life savings and spent it on a family cemetery plot.
Aunt Sally, I'm only 38 years old. Why, just that morning I'd been thinking that when my girls graduate from high school this June maybe I could start to live a little. We had even talked about using that money for something fun, like a family vacation to Myrtle Beach. Just daydreaming about what we'd do with all that money really kept me going some days.
I never, in all my life, thought he was thinking about cemetery plots!
Well, to make a long story short, when he told me what he'd done, I got all torn up, right there at the kitchen table, in front of everyone.
The way I see it, he had no right to spend all that money without talking it over with me.
He said I should be relieved to know that I'd be taken care of for all of eternity.
I cannot tell you how discouraging those words were to me.
Now don't get me wrong; my husband is a good man. But when he told me I'd be spending all of eternity resting beside him at All Souls Cemetery, right here in Poplar Grove, North Carolina, I got slicing pains in my chest.
I always thought something was going to happen sooner or later. Now I keep thinking: what if this is all there is slam up to and even after death? An everlasting eternity of nothing ever happening but the sameold tired routine.
If this is true, I'm desperate. Please tell me what to do before it's too late.
Dear T. W.
It sounds to me like you think too much. You need to stay busy. Join the PTA, teach Sunday school, take up bingo. Get creative. Enclosed is a copy of The Joys Of Jell-O cookbook guaranteed to open up a whole new world of cuisine to you and your family. Perfect tiered Jell-O rings, multicolored ribbon salads, and scrumptious Jell-O strawberry pie. This will add so much excitement and variety to your life, you'll wonder how you got along without it. Especially when you see the looks of gratitude on your family's faces.
Remember you could do worse than to have a husband who knows where he's going in this world and the next. Believe me, I know.
Always remember Aunt Sally Cares.
Until recently I'd have called myself a typical small-town southern housewife.
You know, bored, but resigned to the whole thing.
But things just kept going from bad to worse until I couldn't hardly take it anymore. That's when I decided to write to Aunt Sally Cares in the Barium Springs Daily Ripple, who used to give good advice, but lately sounds more and more like some throwback to the fifties.
(I mean The Joys of Jell-O! You've got to be kidding! But what choice did I have? If I wrote to the Poplar Grove Expositor sure as shooting someone would have recognized me. To tell you the truth, it's almost impossible to have any secrets in a small town.)
It's easier to write to a paper over in Barium Springs since not a living soul over there knows me. It's also just close enough that if I was to run into anyone from home, I'd just say I was there for the Red Star Superette's grand opening two-for-one sale. It would never come to anyone that a person would drive that far for just a Ripple.
Well, after all that driving'it took three trips and about two tanks of gas before my letter appeared in the paper'Aunt Sally gave me the same advice my own Mama Dean would have given me right here at home, for free.
Still, it was weirdest thing. Aunt Sally's advice had no sooner appeared in the evening paper than my telephone started ringing right off the wall. All at once I'd gone from bored to being busier than a one-armed paperhanger.
First, my best friend, Mary Price Bumbalough, called to tell me that our high school class was having its twentieth reunion this summer. Mary Price's phone call shook me up but good, 'cause from what she said, all of our old classmates are leaving home, taking lovers, and seem to know how to live.
So there I was standing in my very own kitchen, talking on my very own phone with Mary Price going on and on about the reunion, when it suddenly came to me like a flash. There is more to life than collecting Tupperware and keeping the sourdough alive and every one of my old classmates already knew it. I was the only one who was sleepwalking through life.
I wondered if it was because I'd stayed behind in Poplar Grove, while the rest of them had seen the world. Why, they'd lived in cities like Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Charlotte'you name it.
Of course, Mary Price never got out of Poplar Grove either and she still lives an exciting life. But then that's Mary Price. Not only does she have a house, a husband, and two kids, she and Hoyt sing and play country music every weekend at the That'lldu Bar & Grill. She's also taken to parading all over town dressed in cowgirl outfits complete with hats and boots. When I told her people were starting to talk about her she just laughed. Mary Price is absolutely fearless.
The more I thought about Mary Price and Hoyt and everyone else who graduated with me, the more I wanted to add some excitement to my own life. But I swanee, what with one thing and another, I just wasn't sure how to get started. I mean, just how far can a nice Methodist girl from Poplar Grove, North Carolina, go?
Especially, when you consider all the obstacles in my way.
First, there's my husband Steven. Steven is a high school biology teacher who makes love only when his vas tubes are blocked. The only time he spent money like a drunken sailor was when he bought the cemetery plots.
Next, there are my twin teenage daughters, Amy and Jill.
Amy is a clean, wholesome, honor-roll student. She wears a smooth shoulder-length bob, cultured pearls, and preppy clothes. Her goal in life is to get into an expensive college, marry someone worthy of her, and leave tacky us and tacky Poplar Grove far behind. Why, even Mama Dean, her great-grandmother, says Amy's got more airs than an