Sweet Tea Tuesdays

In the case of Lula Horne, fifty-five is the new sixty-five, and she’s proud of it. Lula despises modern technology and prefers walking her dog to attending hot yoga. She spends her days tending her perennial garden and cooking for sick friends. She’s stubborn and opinionated and committed to her traditional values, a nonconformist if ever there was one. When her daughter brings her girlfriend home for a visit, Lula goes off like the firework display at her Fourth of July party.

For twenty-six years, Midge, Lula, and Georgia have watched the seasons change and their children grow up while sipping tea on Georgia’s front porch. One Tuesday in early June, Georgia shares news that brings their long-standing social hour to an abrupt halt. Over the course of that summer, everything changes for them. A secret drives them apart and an unexpected diagnosis brings them back together again. As these three women share their lives—their past sorrows and fears of an uncertain future—readers will shed more than one tear.

The thermostat on Lula’s insides was dialed up to broil. Only this time it had nothing to do with hot flashes. Her air conditioner had been on the fritz for two days. The sultry summer air permeated the house through open windows, but the ceiling fans spinning at full blast did little to cool down the rooms. The walls sweated. The doors swelled. Every surface was covered in a sticky film. The heat index in the kitchen was higher by ten degrees than the rest of the house thanks to the pot of butter beans simmering on the stove and the oven preheating to roast.

The thought of eating a heavy meal in this heat made the meager contents of Lula’s stomach sour. Her ideal supper on a blazing hot day consisted of a spoonful of chicken salad and a cup of gazpacho made fresh from the summer’s ripe tomatoes, topped off with a scoop of caramel praline crunch ice cream for dessert. Such meager fixings would not do for her husband. Phillip had grown to expect a three-course meal every night of the week. And she’d done everything in her power as a housewife to foster that growth. She prided herself on her skills as a homemaker—her culinary talents, green thumb, and special knack for making their abode cozy and inviting.

Lula seasoned her eye-of-round roast with salt and pepper and slid the pan into the oven, lowering the temperature to 475 degrees. “Woo wee, it’s hot in here,” she said as she straightened up, a hand pressed firmly on her aching lower back. She caught sight of her seven-year-old Lhasa Apso, who lay panting on his bed in the corner as if he’d chased the neighbor’s cat up a tree even though he hadn’t left his bed since breakfast.

“Are you dying over there, Pooh?”

The dog thumped its tail once and snorted.

“I know, sweet boy. You’ll be cool soon. They should be here any minute.” She glanced at the clock hanging above the kitchen table. Fashioned out of an old piece of driftwood and seashells, the clock her father had helped her create when she was in the fourth grade was part of a Girl Scout project. The clock had marked the time for the last forty-five years of Lula’s life. Just as it had marked the last five hours.

“We’ll send a technician out today between ten and three,” the bored-sounding woman had said when Lula called the repair service about her broken air conditioner. It was now three thirty. Which meant she would be late. And she hadn’t missed her standing four o’clock social with her besties since . . . since never in all the twenty-six years of Tuesdays they’d been getting together for sweet tea and girl talk at Georgia’s. Was she just going to let these repair people hold her hostage all afternoon in her own home?

“I suppose we have no choice.” She looked down into Pooh’s sad brown eyes. “We won’t be able to sleep tonight if we don’t get the air conditioner fixed.”

She ripped a piece of paper towel off the roll mounted under the cabinet and mopped the sweat from her brow. She wadded it up, tossed it into the trash can, and tore off two more sheets. She lifted her cotton blouse and stuffed the paper towels in the damp spots under both breasts. Eek! She really needed to do something about her soft, doughy midsection that was getting softer and doughier by the day in spite of her active life. She served meals at homeless shelters and tutored at after-school programs for underprivileged children. She tended her perennial garden, cleaned her house from top to bottom once a week, and spent hours on her feet in the kitchen cooking for her family and the sick folks who belonged to her church.

So many of her friends had gone gaga over physical fitness. Midge, her next-door neighbor to her left, pounded the pavement every morning, running no fewer than three miles, and Georgia, her neighbor on the other side, attended yoga classes several times a week. The gals in her bridge and book clubs talked incessantly about the exercise classes they attended—spinning and core barre, hot yoga, Pilates, and total-body conditioning. Wasn’t boot camp for the marines? Sixty is the new fifty, blah blah blah. In Lula’s case, fifty-five was the new sixty-five, and she was darn proud of it. Walking Pooh to the stop sign at the end of the street and back three times a day offered ample exertion. Anything extra might cause her ticker to tock.

Lula heard her cell phone ringing in a distant part of the house. She froze, listening. She didn’t want to miss the repairman calling to say he was on the way. She’d told the dispatch woman to have him ring her on the house line, but the woman had been too bored to pay attention. She followed the ringing sound through the back hallway to the new part of the house. Despite the cozy feel of the room—the leather-upholstered furniture, thick wool carpet, and stone fireplace—they referred to this space as the Florida room. The large windows allowed sunlight to beam in and provided a lovely view of her perennial garden, now in full bloom, in the tiny backyard.

Her oldest daughter had already hung up by the time Lula located the phone wedged between the sofa cushions. Brooke knew better than to call her on her cell phone. Lula despised modern technology. She preferred paperback copies over e-books. She wanted her mail delivered by the mailman. And she would rather read a road map than listen to an automated voice on a GPS instructing her where to go. One day all the electronic devices would explode at once and set the world on fire. She laughed out loud at the vision of throngs of tourists walking the downtown streets of Charleston with flaming cell phones pressed to their ears. She’d been having the strangest thoughts lately.

One Christmas several years ago, her family gave her a computer, one of the portable kind that you opened up in your lap. She’d taken it back to the Apple Store and gotten an iPad instead. The handheld gadget served its purpose. She was able to get the e-mails she couldn’t avoid—correspondence relating to family business and confirmation notices of her online purchases. Lula loved to shop for china and crystal on eBay. She now had enough of her wedding and holiday patterns to feed twenty-four. One day her daughters would bring home their spouses and offspring for the holidays. She aimed to be prepared for Thanksgiving and Easter and every occasion in between.

Lula took the phone back to the kitchen and collapsed in a chair at the table. She clicked on the missed call. She had to admit that being instantly connected to her loved ones without having to punch the numbers into her wall phone was convenient.

Brooke answered on the first ring. “Did you lose your phone again, Mom? Where was it this time, at the bottom of your bag?”

Lula brushed her damp auburn bangs off her sweaty forehead. “At the bottom of the sofa, actually.”