Penumbra by Carolyn Haines

college degree or a certain job. Marlena had got him. Now she would have to be his wife, and she wasn’t prepared for what that meant. That had been sixteen years ago. Marlena had been married to Lucas for almost half as long as she’d been alive.
    Jonah blinked the past out of his eyes and was frowning when he went around the porch that circled three sides of the house and knocked at the side door by the kitchen. Miss Lucille would be there, having her coffee and toast. He saw his wife, Ruth, at the stove, the dripolator in her hand. She poured a steady stream into the cup in front of Lucille, but her gaze was on Jonah.
    “Press my teal dress,” Lucille said to Ruth, her voice sloppy at the end of the sentence.
    Jonah stood at the screen door, waiting until the currents of the room were established. If Miss Lucille had been drinking, things would be a lot different than he’d imagined as he came up the road from Drexel.
    “Yes, ma’am,” Ruth said in her Sunday voice.
    Jonah didn’t know what to make of that. Ruth hated Miss Lucille with a pure flame. For thirty-seven years, though, she’d never missed a day of work. She came and she cooked, cleaned, and tended the woman’s needs. She listened to her talk and her bragging. Not once, in all that time, had Ruth ever let on how she really felt. Jonah considered that and realized there were things about his wife that frightened him.
    He’d worked for Lucille Sellers Longier for nearly forty years. Had, in fact, met his wife at Miss Bedelia Sellerses’ Christmas party in 1915, back when her pale gold daughter’s dream of catching a rich man had not yet been tainted by her actions. As it was, in 1918, Lucille had married Jacques Longier, a man forty-two years her senior. A foreigner, Longier hadn’t cared that Lucille had a scandalous past. He’d married Lucille, taken over control of the Sellerses’ money, and bought the town’s silence with total ruthlessness.
    Old Lizzie Tolbert had found out the price of a loose tongue. She’d made it a point to call Lucille a slut and a nigger-lover. Two days later, the Tolbert house burned to the ground. Lizzie’s son had died in the flame. The Tolberts left Drexel. Jacques bought the Tolbert homestead and donated the property to the Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, a black congregation.
    That lesson had never had to be repeated. Folks began to focus on who Lucille was now, not what she’d been in the past.
    In a strange way, Jacques had been Jonah’s benefactor. The Frenchman had come on the scene shortly after Lucille had gotten herself in trouble. Had Lucille wanted to raise the baby girl who was the product of her penchant for drink and a black jazz man, she would have lost Jacques. So Jade—a gift worth any amount of suffering—had been given to him and Ruth, and Lucille’s honor had been restored.
    Jonah felt his wife’s hot glare on him, and he watched as she left the kitchen, going to iron, as Miss Lucille had directed her. Jonah tapped on the screen door. “Miss Lucille, I’m here to drive you whenever you’re ready.”
    “Come in, Jonah,” she said, her back still to the door.
    He stepped into the coolness of the house, amazed anew at how this one house seemed to keep out the August heat. He stopped halfway across the kitchen, not knowing exactly where he should go.
    “Sit down,” Lucille said, waving at the chair across from her. She had her makeup on and her hair fixed, but she was still in her turquoise dressing gown. She’d always favored bright colors. Her lipstick was bright, too, a contrast to her pale skin, which sagged around her jawline.
    Jonah felt apprehension seep into his bones. Lucille was not a woman who asked her hired help to sit at the table with her. “Pour yourself a cup of coffee,” she said.
    He made no move to get a cup. “What time you want to go to the hospital?” he asked. “I could work on the scuppernong arbor until you’re ready to go.”
    “Sit down,” she