The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Lizzy wondered if he was remembering that business with Bunny Scott a couple of years ago, when he had gotten into a dangerous situation of his own. A mistake, he had called it then. But if he remembered, it didn’t seem to help him understand that Grady might have made a very similar mistake. He sounded judgmental.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for suggesting that Alexander could have given a little more thought to what he was doing when that particular accident happened.” His jaw tightened. “You know, you really don’t have to put yourself through this, Liz. Jackman needs somebody in his office starting next week. That would give you time to close up your house and find a place to stay in Montgomery. If you like, we could drive up there tomorrow. You could talk to him, see what you think. By the time you come back to Darling, a lot of the talk will have died down. The first installment, anyway.”

The idea was suddenly tempting. Lizzy put her sandwich down on the wax paper. “But what about you, Mr. Moseley? If I went to Montgomery, who would do my job here?”

He gave a little shrug. “I could probably find someone. Ophelia Snow must be a pretty good typist, the way she handles that Linotype machine. She’s working part-time for Charlie Dickens, so I could maybe get her for three or four hours a day. She wouldn’t do everything you do, of course, but—” He looked uncomfortable. “As you know, things are pretty quiet here right now, Liz. I can probably get by with a part-time person.”

That was true, Lizzy thought. A lot of what she was doing right now was catch-up. “But I would have to leave my house,” she said, thinking aloud. “And my cat. And the Dahlias, just when our busy gardening season is coming up.” She looked at Mr. Moseley, not saying the two small words she was thinking. And you.

Of course, she didn’t mean that in a romantic way. Lizzy had worked very hard to get over the huge crush she’d had on Benton Moseley when she first came to work in his office, when he was a young lawyer and she was just out of high school. But he had married Adabelle, a blond and beautiful debutante from a wealthy Birmingham family. They’d had two girls, blond and pretty like their mother, and had built a fancy house near the Cypress Country Club. Lizzy didn’t see the children with their father very often, but when she did, she noticed that they were flippant, almost disrespectful. She was troubled. She might be old-fashioned, but she felt that children ought to look up to their fathers—although it had occurred to her that perhaps Mr. Moseley wasn’t as attentive a father as he might be. He was often in the office weekends and evenings, while Mrs. Moseley and her daughters spent more and more time with her parents back in Birmingham. And then came the divorce. In retrospect Lizzy knew it had not been any great surprise, at least to her. She didn’t think Mr. Moseley was surprised by it, either.

But of course the divorce made no difference in their working relationship, which had always been relatively formal. Lizzy could happily assure herself that she had outgrown her adolescent crush on him and that her feelings had been securely put away, as people put away clothes they know they’ll never wear again. But still, she felt an obligation toward him, and she had invested too much in this office to leave on a whim. What’s more, she didn’t like the idea that she was running away from gossip, or from the unpleasantness of seeing Grady and his wife in her neighborhood.