The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

“Any word on where the newlyweds are setting up housekeeping?” Bettina asked. Normally, Beulah would have shushed her. Gossip might be a vital entertainment at the Bower (many clients came not just to get beautiful but to catch up on the news), but she didn’t believe that the beauty associates—she and Bettina—should participate. This time, however, she let Bettina’s question stand, since she wanted to hear the answer.

“Louise says they’re looking at houses here in Darling, since it’s closer to where Grady works,” Twyla Sue replied. “Mr. Manning is showing them the Harrison place.” Joe Lee Manning was Darling’s biggest real estate dealer. “It’s been empty for a couple of years and needs a lot of work. But it’ll clean up nice, I’m sure.”

The Harrison house, Beulah thought sadly, was just a block away from Liz’s sweet little cottage, which she was so proud of. She would have to see Grady’s house every day, as she walked to and from work.

“Having them in town will give Mrs. Alexander heartburn, for sure,” Leona Ruth said with barely disguised satisfaction. Beulah remembered that Leona and Mrs. Alexander had had a serious disagreement last year about the way the Baptist church vacation Bible school was run.

Sensing the problem, Bettina stepped behind Leona Ruth and gave her a little nudge. “Come on, Miz Adcock,” she coaxed. “Let’s get you started. You don’t want to spend all morning getting beautiful.”

Leona Ruth could not resist another harrumph, and as she sat down in Bettina’s chair, Beulah heard her say, “I’m sure Mrs. Alexander must be spittin’ nails. Why, Grady must be all of thirty-five, and that girl has just turned twenty? Robbin’ the cradle, if you ask me.”

Beulah turned on the faucet and began to rinse Twyla Sue’s hair. As a Dahlia and a friend of Liz Lacy, she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Grady had jilted Liz—who was smart and pretty and every inch a lady—for a girl just out of her teens who worked in a grain elevator over east of Monroeville. And a Mann, to boot! Not that the Manns weren’t perfectly good people, Beulah told herself hastily, because of course they were. Perfectly good.

Except that Twyla Sue and Archie’s oldest boy, Leroy, was known to be running with French’s bank-robbing gang over in Georgia, and their youngest, Baby Mann, worked in Mickey LeDoux’s bootleg operation. Archie sold Mickey’s white lightning from behind the saddles in his tack room, which would probably be illegal even after Prohibition was repealed. And Archie himself had a volcanic temper and had served six months in jail down in Mobile for assaulting a peace officer.

“Lucky it wasn’t six years,” Sheriff Roy Burns had allowed, and most of Darling agreed with him, especially since the Manns, as a family, had not been known to darken the door of a church for decades.

Beulah was a loving, generous soul and tried not to judge lest she be judged, the way the Bible said. But she was perfectly aware that most Darling folks did a fair amount of judging. They would think less of Grady for marrying a Mann when he could have married Liz. They would also suspect, as Beulah did, that he wouldn’t be marrying anybody but Liz if he didn’t have to. He would be tarred with two brushes, so to speak, both at the same time. When the baby was born, people would count the months backward from the wedding date, and when they got to seven or maybe even six or five, the women would press their lips together and nod knowingly and the men would wink.

Beulah knew what people would think because there was something about getting their hair washed and set that gave her clients permission to come out with whatever was on their minds—and they did. What’s more, she knew everybody in Darling, which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Bower was now the only beauty parlor in town. Last winter, Julia Conrad had been in a little accident (her husband, Merle, had swerved to miss a pig on the Jericho Road) and was laid up with a broken hip, so Conrad’s Curling Corner was closed and would probably stay closed. But while breaking a hip was a bad thing and Beulah had every sympathy for poor Julia, she didn’t mind the extra business. She and Bettina were as busy as bees in a summer flower garden.