The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue by Regina Hale Sutherland Read Free Book Online Page A

ignored her offer? I had always been a sucker for making other people feel
     better, and so I took the spade she offered me and pasted a smile on my face. “Okay. You can try and turn me into a gardener,
     but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
    Grace chuckled. “By the time I’m done with you, Ellie,
Better Homes and Gardens
will be calling for your advice.”
    Twenty minutes later, Grace had lost some of her amusement and she’d quit predicting my launch as a horticulturalist of some
     renown. We were on our knees in the backyard, ready to attack the jungle that had once been beautiful landscaping. We wore
     matching pink paisley gardening gloves, and the sun beat down on our uncovered heads.
    “No, Ellie, dear. That’s not the weed. That’s the plant.”I think she was gritting her dentures, because her jaw beneath her wrinkled skin was pretty tight.
    “Are you sure? It looks pretty weedy to me.”
    “You can’t always tell by how it looks,” Grace said, stooping down to pull my hands away from their intended victim.
    “Then how do you know?”
    “I suppose because somebody teaches you which is which. Like I’m doing for you. My mother taught me, just like she taught
     me to play bridge.”
    I could picture Grace and her mother in old-fashioned clothes, working together in the yard or sitting across a card table
     from one another. Grace’s hair would have been in braids down her back, and her feet would have dangled a few inches off the
     floor in one of the straight-backed dining chairs. The image tugged at my heartstrings. My mother had been far too tired in
     the evenings to do anything but soak her aching feet while I heated more water and dispensed Epsom salts into the tub. Our
     weekends had been filled with shopping for groceries, trips to the Laundromat, and cleaning house. I couldn’t recall any times
     when we’d planted flowers or played a game together. The closest we’d come to a recreational activity had been sitting side
     by side in church.
    Grace motioned for me to come closer, so I half-crawled, half-scooted toward her until the five feet between us was reduced
     to inches.
    “Try it like this,” she advised me, grabbing a weed—I still wasn’t clear how to identify one—at the point where it sprang
     from the soil and pulling it slowly but firmlytoward her. “You have to get all of the roots, or it will just grow back.”
    “Okay,” I said, my eyes searching the tangle of greenery as I tried to identify a weed of my own to pull. I located what I
     thought was one of the offenders, reached down the stem as far as possible, and gave it my best yank. It broke off in my hand
     well above the roots. I looked at Grace, clutched the plant, and waited for the inevitable scold.
    Instead, she laughed, her frustration withering as quickly as the poor dead plant in my hand.
    “You tried to warn me, didn’t you?” She smiled.
    “Let’s just say that my potential as a bridge player far exceeds my possibility as a gardener, and you know that’s not saying
     much.”
    Grace slipped off her gardening gloves and used the back of her hand to wipe perspiration from her forehead. Her skin resembled
     the crepe paper I’d always used to festoon the dining room for one of my children’s birthday parties.
    “Ellie, who convinced you that your only value lies in how well you do something? Don’t you get any credit just for being
     you?”
    Perspiration slid off my forehead, too, stinging my eyes as sharply as Grace’s question stung my psyche.
    “I don’t know what you mean.” Of course I knew exactly what she meant, but I wasn’t ready to go there.
    “I mean who convinced you that you have no intrinsic value?” She tugged her gloves back on. “Sometimes it’s the mother.” She
     yanked at another weed and it came up easily, roots and all. She tossed it over her shoulder ontothe crabgrass-infested lawn. “Sometimes it’s the husband. Even the children.” As she ticked off each