Real or nightmare—it didn’t matter. His buddies had been blown up in an explosion that he could have prevented if he’d only been with them. He was glad to see the sun peeking up over the horizon, giving shape to the tombstones in the cemetery right next to his place. When daylight came, he didn’t have to worry about the dreams and he could stay so busy that sometimes he even forgot about the guilt he carried with him. He got into his twenty-year-old pickup truck and ate half a dozen cookies while he listened to the radio and drove the half mile up to the Banty House.

Washing their fancy car was his first job on Fridays. Most of the time the car didn’t even need to be cleaned, but Connie could find a fleck of dust hiding in a dirt pile. And she knew they stirred up all the dust driving into town on Thursdays for their beauty-shop appointment and their grocery shopping. After it was cleaned up, he’d check the oil and everything under the hood to be sure that nothing was needed there. Then he’d go on to mow the huge lawn and take care of Connie’s flower beds. Beyond that, they always found a few odd jobs to keep him busy the rest of the day—sometimes helping Kate in the cellar or maybe doing whatever Betsy needed to make her jams or jellies, or even helping Connie on the days that she decided to move everything out of a guest bedroom to clean it.

They always paid him well for his day’s work, but what he liked best was that they invited him to eat dinner with them at noon. Betsy was a fantastic cook, and her biscuits reminded him of his granny’s. He parked in his usual spot in front of the house and checked the rosebushes on his way across the yard to see if they needed any buds clipped. He whistled as he made his way up the four steps onto the porch and knocked on the doorjamb. He expected to hear someone yell for him to come on in, but that morning the door flew open and there stood the cutest and the most pregnant little blonde woman he’d seen in a while.

“I’m Sloan. I’m here to work for the Carson sisters today,” he said.

This was the first time in his remembrance that they’d brought home a pregnant stray. Usually, it was older women or sometimes men who needed a place to stay for a day or two while their house was being fumigated, or maybe just before they were about to make a move from their home to a nursing facility.

“Hello, Sloan.” She stuck out her hand. “Betsy told me that you would be coming this morning. I’m Ginger.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He shook her hand and then dropped it.

“Come on in,” Betsy called out from the kitchen. “Have you had breakfast? We’ve eaten, but there’s plenty of leftovers.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve eaten.” Sloan removed his cap and wiped his feet before entering the house. He slid a sly look over toward Ginger again. Had the old ladies completely lost their minds? This was more than following the first of their deceased mother’s rules—the one about not turning away strangers. What if that woman had the baby before they could get rid of her? She might weasel her way right into their hearts with a baby and then rob them blind.

Betsy poked her head around the kitchen door. “I see you’ve met Ginger. She’s stayin’ with us. Today she’s helping me make elderberry jelly.”

“You about to use up all that juice we put up last summer?” Sloan reached for the key to the garage.

“Not quite. I figure it’ll last until harvest in late August, and then we’ll be ready to start all over. Folks sure like it,” Betsy said.

“You should’ve put in a café years ago,” Sloan told her as he headed across the kitchen floor. “If people ever got a taste of your biscuits with elderberry jelly on ’em, they’d swarm the café like ants to an open sugar bowl.”

“I’m too old to manage a café, and besides, I’d have to keep a schedule. With my jams and jellies, I just make them when I want to, and folks come to me to buy them. I sold the last of my wild plum the first of the week, so we may make a batch of that today, too,” Betsy said.

“If you ladies need me, just holler.” Sloan slipped out the door and closed it behind him. He’d have to keep a good eye on the ladies for sure, and see to it that this Ginger woman left in a day or two at the most. Poor old souls were so damn gullible that they didn’t know people in the modern world could be conniving.

Ginger pinched herself on the leg, and it hurt like hell, so she was definitely not dreaming. She’d had a bath in a big claw-foot tub the night before—one so deep that she could sink all the way down to her neck, leaving her pregnant belly the only thing poking up out of the water. She’d slept in a bed with sheets that smelled like flowers and laid her head on a soft feather pillow, and she’d awakened to the smell of coffee and bacon floating up the stairs to her bedroom.

The bedroom was an absolute dream, with a hand-quilted spread on the four-poster bed, a pretty crystal lamp on the bedside table, and even one of those long velvet chaise lounges against one wall. She felt like a queen when she sat on it and propped her feet up to read a book before she went to bed. To put the icing on the cake, there was a bookcase that reached from one wall to the other, and what shelves weren’t filled with novels had decorative things on them. She particularly liked the figurines that looked like little children, but she was afraid to touch them.

Sloan had looked at her like he could see through her—all the way to her soul—and he didn’t like what he saw. But then, if she’d been in his shoes, she might have also had second thoughts about some woman the ladies dragged into their home. She unzipped three plastic bags of elderberries and poured them into the pot that Betsy brought out from the cabinet.

“I thought Sloan would be an old gray-haired man,” she said.

“Why would you think that?” Betsy barely covered the elderberries with water and started smashing them with a potato masher.

“You said that he lives alone and does odd jobs,” Ginger answered. “Most guys his age have a job like in a factory or a business of some kind.”

“He’s a good man, that Sloan is, but . . . ,” Betsy said.

Connie butted into the conversation as she headed over to the pantry and brought out a fresh can of furniture polish. “But he went into the military right out of high school, and they sent him home more than two years ago.”

“What happened back then?” Kate asked as she opened the door and came up from the basement to join them.

“Sloan came home,” Connie said.

“That’s right.” Kate nodded. “His granny said that he didn’t do anything wrong, but there was some kind of trouble over there, and he’s been kinda like a hermit ever since. He don’t talk about the time he was in the army, but his granny said that it all happened when they sent him to Kuwait, or maybe it was Iran—one of those foreign places, anyway. We don’t get much into politics here at our place.”

“Why does your house have a name?” Ginger caught a whiff of alcohol and cinnamon mixed together when Kate walked past her to get a cup of coffee.

“It’s like this . . .” Kate sat down at the table and blew on her coffee. “Rooster hasn’t ever been very big, and it’s kind of out of the way, what with it being on a dead-end road that stops at the Cottonwood Cemetery. Way back there at the end of the Civil War, just south of us was a black community named Mission Valley.”

Connie poured herself a mug of coffee, added a heaping spoonful of sugar and a lot of whipping cream to it, and then sat down beside Kate. “Grandma Carson told me that it was named that because there was a Baptist church and a Methodist church, both of the missionary type, down in that area.”

Ginger didn’t want a history lesson. She only wanted to know how they came to name their home the Banty House. Something like the Sisters’ Mansion sounded more fitting to her than the name of a little male fighting chicken.

“So anyway, the Mission Valley community and both churches are gone now. The cemetery is still down there.” Betsy set the pot of elderberries off to the side, poured herself a cup of coffee, and joined them. “And it was all grown over. Folks that come to find their relatives had to walk through weeds and cockleburs and hope there weren’t no rattlesnakes hiding in all that until Sloan came home. He devotes a day a week to mowing and keeping the little graveyard looking decent.”

“Our family is buried there,” Kate went on. “Grandma and Mama, and there’s plots for each of us.”

Ginger wondered what all that had to do with the name of the house, but she’d learned through the years to be patient. The ladies seemed to be enjoying the reminiscing about the area. Maybe the cemetery itself had something to do with the name of the house.

“Anyway . . . ,” Connie sighed, “back then Rooster had a bank, a post office, and a general store. Our great-grandparents, Elizabeth and Rooster Carson, were instrumental in starting the town when they put in the general store and built this house. And yes, that was his real name—it’s right there on his tombstone. Rooster was his mama’s maiden name, so that’s where they got it, but from what we hear of his reputation, he was a short man with a real cocky attitude.”