“Sure are.” Betty pats her pouffed hair. “Got my hair done and everything.”
Tammy, the cook from the Justice ranch, steps inside the store. The little bell tinkles for a moment, catching everyone’s attention.
“Tammy! Finally. I’m dying of thirst,” cries Marth.
“We are parched, but just for your company,” Linda layers on a little sweetness. Tammy just laughs as she exchanges cheek kisses with Marth, careful to hold her peach cobbler to the side.
“Come, come.” Linda gestures for the ladies to join her at the table.
Tammy places the cobbler between the pitcher of booze and the pieces of fudge. “I’m sorry I’m late, but it was so busy at the ranch. Ever since Princess Maria’s girl won that acting award, we’ve been hosting people nonstop.”
“I saw the photos of her wearing Birdie’s dress on the red carpet.” Betty pulls out her tablet. “She was named best dressed. Look here.” She shows everyone the screen.
“Of course she was. Little Anna Justice could wear a burlap sack and look beautiful,” announces Marth. “Here. Everyone eat the cobbler before the ice cream all melts.”
“Can you believe that there are so many Justices out in the world now?” Betty asks between bites of ice cream and pastry. “How many kids are there?”
Tammy puts down her fork. “Let me count. Calder and Birdie have three. Tucker and Cam have five. I think she might be angling for a sixth, and he doesn’t seem to be opposed. Cane and Astor only have the two, but since they’re so beautiful, you have to think that’s because God figured the world could only handle the pair.”
The table silently nods in agreement. When Cane and Astor’s boy and girl walk into any crowd, everyone gasps, and then it takes them about five minutes to find their tongues. The Sew Be It ladies have discussed this phenomena before and have come to the conclusion that was how the Medusa myth came about. Coco Justice literally had people on their knees at a college football championship game. No one was watching her cousin throw the ball for the winning touchdown. Instead, everyone in her vicinity was trying for her phone number, her hand in marriage, or just even a nod of acknowledgement, but like her mom, she has no interest in the limelight. Word around Edison is that she has feelings for the sheriff’s boy from Casper County, but he’s so oblivious she could strip in front of him and he’d think she got stung by a bee or something. The Sew Be It ladies aren’t sure if they should nudge that situation along or if the boy is too dumb for Coco Justice.
“Blake and Reese—”
“Our best couple,” sighs Betty, holding her hands to her chest.
“Best thing we ever did was get them together. Whose idea was it to put her on the dating app?” Marth wonders.
Linda shifts in her seat to alleviate her hip pain and then raises her hand. “Mine. I knew that Blake would come running if he had competition.”
“The hardest was Calder,” Tammy sighs. “I thought we’d never get him married.”
“It’s because of the curse.” Martha purses her lips for a moment. “I guess we went overboard with that.”
“We did it out of love, though.” Betty looks up to the sky. “We did it for Geraldine.”
Geraldine Justice was Earl Justice’s first wife and an original member of the Sew Be It circle. No one had a prettier stitch than she. Geraldine had gotten pregnant, but a sly woman who wanted to break up their marriage told Earl that Geraldine had cheated on him. He locked Geraldine up in that suite of rooms that they called the Widow’s Chambers. She died there from heartbreak and lack of medical care, taking the baby with her. It made him mad. He married and remarried, but no babies came from it. He needed an heir for the Justice land, so he gathered up all the nephews under his wing.
It was easy enough for him to do. In a weird fluke, the mothers all died close in time to each other.
Earl was a nasty piece of work. He said women were the devil and would bring the land to ruin. He told the boys never to respect a woman, never to trust them, never to give them even a dime. He married a woman who had a daughter, Birdie. As Tammy reported this back to the sewing circle, the ladies grew concerned. There were no women in the household to counteract Earl’s training as Birdie was too young, so the Sew Be It circle concocted a story that the lack of women in the Justice world was the result of a curse. Since all their mothers had passed, the curse had substance.
One ranch hand told another until that whisper became a fact. It was easy to believe. There weren’t any Justice women alive. As for the previous generations of Justice women, well, no one had kept any genealogy records for them. Why would they? Previous Justice women had either died in childbirth, run off with other men, or just faded away. Power and money made unwanted people disappear, and Justice men always had both.