“I’ll get the cake,” Dotty said. “Anyone want ice cream with it? I know Sugar always keeps half a supply in the freezer.”

“Yes.” Tucker raised his hand.

“Me, too,” Lucy said.

“Wine, beer, cake, and ice cream?” Dotty shook her head. “You’ll be sick for sure.”

Lucy inhaled deeply and let it out in a whoosh. “Stop bossin’ me.”

Jolene had heard those three words before—lots of times. She’d beg Elaine to stay home on Friday and Saturday nights, to save the money for food or bills. And she’d get the same response—stop bossin’ me. Only it would be usually be followed up by Elaine yelling that if Jolene were a better daughter, she’d love her unconditionally and stop trying to change her.

“Miz Lucy, if you have a little hangover, Jolene has a magic remedy. You just call me and I’ll tell you how to fix it,” Tucker said.

Lucy tilted her chin up. “I won’t need it.”

And just what’s the difference in what Tucker does and what I did? Jolene’s mother’s voice was so clear in her head that Jolene cut her eyes around the room to see if she was there.

For one thing, he doesn’t have a teenage daughter who deserved a life of her own and who shouldn’t have needed to worry about grown-up things long before her time, Jolene answered.

He got the hangover medicine this morning. What do you have to say about that? Elaine argued. Like she’d done so many times in real life, Jolene let her mother have the last word by forcing her voice out of her head.

Sometime in the middle of that mental conversation, Dotty had brought in the cake and ice cream. “We’ll pass it around, and everyone can get however big of a piece they want.”

Lucy twisted the cap off the beer and took a long gulp. “That’ll clean my palate for the cake.”

Tucker shooed all four of the ladies into the living room with the rest of the wine after dinner was finished. “You brought the food. Jolene and I will do the cleanup. Go pretend like you are guests of the Magnolia Inn. No, don’t pretend. You are our very first guests, even if you didn’t stay the night here.”

“I knew I liked that boy from the first time I met him.” Lucy headed that way with a wineglass in one hand and a half-empty bottle of beer in the other.

There’s no one who’s all good or who’s all bad. What comes out and makes them look either way are the choices they make. Jolene remembered Aunt Sugar telling her that when she complained about Reuben.

Did that apply to her drug-addicted mother? For years Jolene’d not been able to find a good thing about her mom, and then Elaine had died in that miserable, cheap hotel room. Maybe if Jolene would get over not having been there with her and not being able to stop the downward spiral, then she could hang on to a few of the good moments they’d shared.

Tucker followed Jolene to the kitchen with a stack of plates in his hands. “Now explain to me what just happened in there. That didn’t look like an intervention to me, and why are they even having one?”

“It’s complicated. From what I understand, Lucy feels guilty because she sleeps with men, and then they either die or break up with her. I think it might be her upbringing. Back in her day, sex before marriage was this big no-no.” Jolene rinsed dishes and put them into the dishwasher.

Tucker frowned. “So this is to get her out of religion? Most of the time folks try to push a person into it, not pull them out of it.”

“Evidently they know what they’re doin’,” Jolene said. “Their method worked with Dotty.”

“Guess you can’t argue with something that’s already been proven.” Tucker nodded in agreement. “Think Lucy can make it upstairs to see what we’ve accomplished?”

“If that ‘sweet boy’”—Jolene put air quotes around the words—“will offer her his arm and go slow, I bet she’ll make it just fine.”

“Been a helluva long time since I was called a boy.” Tucker chuckled.

“Oh, yeah! How long?”

“Well, honey, I was born in 1981. You do the math,” he answered.

“Thirty-eight?”

“On my birthday in April. And you?”

“Never was called a boy,” she told him. “I’ll be thirty-two in April. What day is your birthday?”

He scraped the leftover rice into the trash can. “The thirtieth.”

“Mine is the twenty-ninth,” she said.

How did a mother turn her back on a responsible kid like Jolene? Tucker wondered. How could a mother ever become addicted when she had a daughter? If he and Melanie had had children, he’d have still hurt when she was killed, but he would have had something to live for.

You’ve got something to live for now, so why are you still hitting the bottle? That niggling voice in his head sounded like Melanie.

He blinked away the question he didn’t want to answer and said, “Guess us partners ain’t never gonna forget the other one’s special day, are we?”

“Guess not.” She smiled. “And now we’d better get in there before our children get into more trouble than a simple hangover remedy can get them out of.”

“So we’ve adopted them?” Tucker asked.