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

offender, another weed
     flew through the air to join the pile.
    “You’re way off base,” I snapped, but we both knew my flash of temper came from Grace’s words hitting too close to home.
    “Am I?” She pulled two more weeds and began to hum under her breath. I couldn’t quite make out the tune.
    “I’m not one of those sad women who give up their sense of self because they stay at home all day.”
    “I didn’t say you were.”
    “You implied it.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, and I found it even harder to believe that I was letting
     her get to me. She was obviously a well-meaning old busybody, but the last thing I needed was a red-hat-wearing, gray-haired
     Oprah trying to analyze me down the path to empowerment.
    “I know my own worth.” I reached out, fingers desperate to find the right green thing to pluck out of the dirt. Frustration
     blurred my vision.
    “Do you?”
    Great. I really was being psychoanalyzed.
    “Look, Grace, if you have something to say, please just say it.” I started plucking at plants indiscriminately. Since I couldn’t
     tell the good ones from the bad ones, why not just uproot everything and start from scratch?
    “Wait, wait. Don’t pull up the daisies.”
    My hand stopped in mid-pluck. “I might as well just clear the whole thing out and start over,” I said, and suddenly I knew
     I wasn’t just talking about my flower beds.I’d been pushing Jim’s phone call to the edges of my consciousness.
    “But you don’t need to start over.” Grace looked me straight in the eye. “There’s plenty here worth saving. It just needs a bit of discernment.”
    Discernment?
    She nodded her head like she’d heard the question in my thoughts. “You just need some time to sort out the good from the bad.”
    I sank back on my bottom, arching my back to ease the ache there. “How much time will it take for me to learn how to garden?”
     We both knew my question had to do with a lot more than rescuing my yard from encroaching chaos.
    “That depends,” Grace said.
    “On what?”
    “On how patient you’re willing to be.”
    “I don’t have time to be patient.” I needed a new life, and I needed it now. I had mortgage payments to make, a charity ball
     to commandeer, and an ex-husband who couldn’t wait to race down the aisle with a woman who made Pamela Anderson look like
     a Rhodes Scholar. I needed to be fabulous, and I needed it now.
    “I don’t think you have any choice.”
    “I don’t know why not. It would be much simpler that way.”
    “I suppose. But it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying.”
    At that point, though, I didn’t have much interest in feeling satisfied. I just didn’t want to feel so desperate anymore.
     But when I thought about it, I realized that the rest of the day stretched before me like a yawning, emptycavern. I had no plans. Nowhere to be. The only thing on my “To Do” list was to e-mail my son about setting up a Web site
     and to call Karen about a discount at the print shop. Together, those tasks might take fifteen minutes. I looked at the length
     of the flower bed as it stretched along the side of the yard, across the back fence, and back the other way toward the house.
     What Grace proposed was a formidable task, but, again, it was better than sitting in the living room and eating Twinkies.
    “All right. I’ll try. But I may pull up more plants than weeds.”
    “You might at first,” Grace said. “But I bet you’ll learn to tell the difference.”
    I didn’t answer. I hoped she was right. If you looked at the last few years of my life, it was hard to make a case for the
     brevity of my learning curve.
    “Okay, so what do I look for in a weed?”
    Grace nodded her approval. “The thing to realize is that calling something a weed is an arbitrary designation. It’s only a
     weed because we say it is.” She looked me straight in the eye again to emphasize her point. “You know, we call something a