The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

But mostly, people who were born in Darling were content to stay right there, since it was a very nice town. Some, of course, went off for the sake of adventure or because they had to, like the boys in gray who marched off to the tune of “Dixie” and the boys in khaki who marched off to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Some of them didn’t come home again because they couldn’t, and a few decided to go and live where they could get a better job and make more money. But in general, the men who left came back as soon as they could and married their hometown sweethearts and lived happily ever after, right there in Darling.

But not Charlie Dickens, who (as Bessie knew) had gone off to Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn after high school and then to New York to the journalism school at Columbia University and after that to a reporting job on the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And after the army and France, it was back to the States, moving from place to place. Finally, he got to Baltimore, where he landed a good job as a reporter on the city desk at the Sun, until a new editor took over and the two of them discovered that they didn’t see eye to eye about a great many important things, mainly having to do with Charlie’s passion for investigative journalism. He had written a couple of in-depth features about police corruption in the city and raised some hackles in the police department and the mayor’s office. And that was the end of his reporting career at the Sun.

About that same time, Doc Roberts diagnosed Charlie’s father—the owner and editor of the Darling Dispatch—with lung cancer, and Charlie came home to help out. Then Mr. Dickens died, and there was the newspaper with no editor and there was Charlie, a newsman with nowhere in particular to go. It seemed like the natural thing for him to settle down to his father’s job. Or try to, since he didn’t have any experience in managing a rural newspaper with a small subscription list, not much advertising, and a faltering job printing business on the side.

He didn’t have a sweetheart to come home to, either, since Angelina Dupree had married Artis Biggs just five months after Charlie went away to college, which was probably what turned him sour on love. (The fact that Angelina and Artis’ first boy arrived on the scene seven months to the day after the wedding might have had something to do with it, too. Or maybe it was because Charlie suspected that Angelina fell for Artis because he drove the first Buick in town, while Charlie was saving his money for college.) But that had been a long time ago, and Edna Fay said Charlie didn’t harbor hard feelings.

Charlie himself had never married. He often said he’d seen too many bad marriages to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of marital happiness. And that he had seen too much of the world out there to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of anybody living happily ever after in Darling, which (he said) was nothing more than a two-bit Southern town that figured it was worth twenty-five dollars. And even when he became the editor of the Dispatch, which you would think would be a kind of rah-rah cheerleading job, he didn’t try to hide that opinion.

Bessie knew all this because of being best friends with Charlie’s kid sister. Edna Fay was married to Doc Roberts and kept busy managing his office, but she and Bessie still got together as often as they could. When they did, Bessie always asked about her brother and Edna Fay was always glad to give her an earful of the inside story, which is how Bessie had managed to keep track of Charlie’s whereabouts and what fors through the years.

But not because she especially cared, of course. Like Charlie, Bessie had been sour on love, too, for her heart had been broken forever when her fiancé, Harold Hamer, skipped town on the very day they were planning to buy their wedding rings. At least, that’s what Bessie thought, until just six months ago, when she was going through a box of old papers from her father’s funeral parlor business, which she had sold to Lionel Noonan. That’s when she figured out what had happened to Harold, and why. It took her a while to get over the shock, but knowing the truth made her feel better. She could finally stop grieving over the past and get on with the present.

Bessie was reflecting on all this as she walked toward the square that morning, having hung the sheets on the backyard clothesline and left Roseanne to finish the rest of the laundry. Her first stop was at Lima’s Drugstore, on the southwest corner of the square, where she bought a box of Wildroot Wave Set for Leticia Wiggins, a tube of Dr. West’s toothpaste for Mrs. Sedalius, and some Blue Jay corn plasters for herself. Then she took a shortcut across the courthouse lawn to the grocery store, where she handed her weekly shopping list to Mrs. Hancock.