Sweet Gone South by Alicia Hunter Pace Page B

But take this.” She picked up the lasagna she’d inspected earlier and raised it above her head. “Yep. That’s what I thought. It has a name on the bottom. I’d wager all of these non-disposable dishes have names on the bottom. In this case, it’s Jerrilyn Chambers. You have to return the dish, which means you have to go to her house or call her to make arrangements to see her. Neat.” She wiggled her fingers. “All tied up like a pretty little bow. It’s the pie plate mating ritual. Many good men have been felled by it.”
    He laughed. She was funny. “That’s quite the trick. Have you ever felled a man with Pyrex?”
    “No. I haven’t needed to.” She took another drink of her beer.
    “Not even Nathan Scott?” Maybe she would say she wasn’t dating the Merritt High coach anymore. Not that he cared.
    “Pyrex wouldn’t work on Nathan. He doesn’t care what he eats. Or much if he eats.” She picked up a fancy covered serving dish with some flowers painted on it. “Ah, look at this. This one really wants your attention. No way that you can keep this.” She lifted the lid and laughed. “My, my, my! What have we here?” She smelled the contents. “Unless I miss my guess, this is shrimp creole from the county club.” She lifted the dish and looked at the bottom. “Why, I do believe that Jill St. Clare took her good china to the club for Chef Michael to fill.”
    “Really? Are you sure?”
    “Oh yes, I’m sure. It my favorite thing at the club and I know Jill. She’s lazy.”
    “It’s your favorite thing? We could call, find out the ingredients. Then we could eat it. You could eat with us.” Had he really said that? And why? He didn’t need any more company. He still needed to figure out something for Emma to wear to church tomorrow and email the Birmingham agency to set up interviews with potential nannies.
    “No,” Lanie said. “We can’t eat that.”
    “Why not? That is, if it doesn’t have any peanut products?”
    “Because it’s shrimp. And you’ve left it out all day.”
    He didn’t realize until after Lanie had gone that, for a few minutes, he hadn’t felt alone.
    And, somehow, the knowledge that there could be life in a room where there was no Carrie only multiplied the loneliness.

CHAPTER THREE
    By Monday night, Luke still had not recovered from letting Emma nap until after seven o’clock Saturday night. Lanie had been right. Nothing like a three-year-old revved up and ready to go in the middle of the night. They’d slept through church, and though he’d tried to keep her from taking a nap, when she’d passed out on the grass at the park late in the afternoon, he hadn’t had the heart to wake her. Hard as he’d tried, he’d not been able to get her into bed until after ten last night. And this morning he’d had to get them both up and moving before six because he’d had to speak at the Rotary breakfast meeting.
    It had been his plan for Emma to sit quietly while he made his speech but Lanie had run into them in the stairwell and offered to feed Emma and take her to school. He’d been so grateful that he didn’t even stop to think about whether it was a good idea to let Lanie become more involved in their lives. Truth was, though she was certainly more of a free spirit than he was, she wasn’t the train wreck he’d perceived her to be. And he liked having her around a little too much.
    It was almost midnight when he slipped on the shorts and t-shirt he planned to sleep in and checked on Emma one last time. He smoothed the covers over her and pulled her thumb from her mouth. It was time for the thumb sucking to stop but he didn’t know how, just like he didn’t know how to toilet train her. Two days ago, when they were in a restaurant, she’d asked to go potty and he’d panicked. It had seemed wrong to take her to the men’s room and he certainly couldn’t take her to the women’s. It had all ended in a diaper change, which he did in the car. His mother and