“Are you serious?” Ginger asked.

She seemed genuinely surprised at the invitation. Maybe she wasn’t out to fleece his friends after all and was really what she claimed to be—just a woman down on her luck.

“Yes, we’re very serious. Mama wouldn’t want us to turn you out right here at Easter. It was her favorite holiday,” Kate offered.

“You barely know me,” Ginger said.

“They’re pretty good at reading people.” Sloan dipped deep into the mashed potatoes when they came his way. “I’ve seen them follow rule number one a lot of times.” They’d sure looked after him plenty of times since his grandmother died.

“And the next morning, we sometimes feed our stranger and send them on their way,” Betsy said as she picked up the gravy boat and handed it to Sloan. “Mama said that the rule said we could tell within twenty-four hours if we had an angel or just a passerby.”

Connie shot a smile across the table toward her. “I’ve been wearing a lapis lazuli next to my heart since you got here. It leads to enlightenment and wisdom. In the dream, I saw us all four hunting Easter eggs together. I never go against a dream, just in case it’s Mama talkin’ to me in spirit form.”

She’d given Sloan a small chunk of rose quartz when he first came to work for them. He was supposed to keep it with him at all times, and according to Connie, it would heal all emotional problems. He’d thrown it in the dresser drawer with his socks when he got home and had forgotten all about it until that moment.

“Are you Wiccan?” Ginger asked.

“Not really,” Connie answered. “Mama taught me the healing powers of the stones. I didn’t even know that it was a part of Wicca until I was grown.”

“It’s bad enough that everyone has thought our blood was tainted for all these years. We sure don’t want them thinking that we’re witches.” Kate passed the green beans to Connie.

“I’ll be glad when we can start gathering garden vegetables. These green beans aren’t bad, Betsy, but fresh ones are so much better.” Connie sighed.

“You’ll have to come up here in the evenings and snap beans with us when they start coming in,” Kate told Sloan.

“Be glad to,” he said.

Working more than one day a week occasionally in the spring and summer wasn’t anything new, but they’d never invited him to sit on the porch and snap beans or shell peas with them. Maybe Connie had consulted her stones and decided that he wasn’t getting enough social life.

“Just so y’all know,” Kate said, “I’ve already asked Sloan to start helping us on Saturdays, and he belongs to me that day. We’ve got to get the corn in the ground, and I’d like to enlarge our garden, especially the strawberry patch for Betsy’s jams.”

Betsy turned her head slowly and gave Kate the old stink eye. “And I bet you want those strawberries for your moonshine, don’t you?”

“Thought I might experiment with it a little,” Kate said.

Sloan chuckled. “Sounds like it might be good.”

“My best seller is the apple pie, but I thought about trying some different things, like maybe wild grape and even buttered pecan if I can figure out just how to do it all,” Kate said.

Ginger couldn’t believe that she was sitting around the table with three old ladies who looked like they’d be strict Sunday-school teachers and they were talking about moonshine. That shouldn’t have been a surprise since they lived in an old brothel, but it shocked her nonetheless.

“So when’s the baby due?” Sloan asked right out of the blue sky.

Ginger shrugged. “I’m not real sure.”

“Didn’t the doctor give you a due date?” Connie asked.

Ginger shook her head. “I haven’t seen a doctor yet. I just bought one of those drugstore tests and it was positive.” She hadn’t given much thought to the time when the baby would be born. Up until she sat down on that bench in front of the beauty salon, she’d just been trying to get through a day at a time.

“Good Lord!” Kate gasped. “I’ll call Doc Emerson and make an appointment for you.”

Ginger felt the heat crawling from the back of her neck all the way to her face. She was sure if she looked in the mirror, she’d have two bright-red circles on her cheeks. “I should wait until I have enough money to pay him.”

“We’ve been bartering with Doc since before Mama died, and she passed almost sixty years ago. He does like his shine, and he doesn’t like to pay for it, so . . .” Kate shrugged.

“Thank you,” Ginger said. If she was dreaming, it went far beyond anything she’d ever imagined, maybe short of winning the lottery. She reminded herself that she’d be leaving on Monday morning, so she shouldn’t get too attached to these sisters.

“So, where do you come from, Ginger?” Sloan broke the moment of silence.

“All over Kentucky,” she answered. “The latest place was in Lexington, but most of my life was spent in and around Harlan County.”

“I knew a guy in the army who had an accent like yours.” Sloan buttered another biscuit. “Man would use five hundred words when five would do the job.”

“I’ve known folks like that.” Ginger passed the platter of chicken to him.

She didn’t even have to close her eyes to get a clear picture in her head of Lucas Dermott. He’d promised her the moon, the stars, and half the universe if she’d leave the shelter and live with him. He’d delivered the first two all right. She could see them through cracks in the dirty windows in the last apartment where they’d lived before he was shot and killed. At first she’d tried to keep the windows clean, but that proved to be an exhausting job. Dust and dirt from the gravel business nearby, plus all the grime that flew up to the second-story windows from the car-repair shop below them, collected on the windows on a daily basis. Using his ability to sweet-talk, Lucas would run a few scams occasionally, but that money went for what he wanted to buy. The paycheck she brought in as a waitress had paid the rent and put food on the table.

“You don’t say much, do you?” Sloan nudged her shoulder with his.

“Neither do you,” she shot back.

“Maybe we’ll have to work on that.” His shoulder touched hers again.

The sparks from his touch brought her from the past to the present in a split second. “I was just enjoyin’ this fine meal and y’all’s company. Last time I sat down in a dinin’ room like this was in Harlan, Kentucky. A little girl became my friend at the new school and invited me to have supper with her family. My foster mother said it would be all right.”

“What happened?” Connie asked.

“That was the only time I was invited. Guess they figured out that I wasn’t going to be a cheerleader.” She raised a shoulder in a shrug.

“Funny how that works, isn’t it?” Connie’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I wanted to be a cheerleader, too, but Mama’s reputation and the fact that we didn’t have one hundred percent white blood in our veins put a stop to that.”

“The past is gone. The future is iffy. That means the present is all we’ve got, so we’ll dwell on that,” Kate said.

“You sound just like Mama,” Connie told her. “And she was always right. So let’s talk about the peach cobbler that Ginger helped me make for dessert. We’ve got fresh whipped cream for the top. If everyone is ready, I’ll bring it out.”

Ginger pushed back her chair. “I’ll carry the dessert bowls for you.”

Connie laid a hand on her shoulder when they reached the kitchen, and then she leaned over and whispered, “Sloan don’t usually talk as much as he has today.”

“I didn’t think he said all that much,” Ginger said in a soft voice, wishing she could get to know him better.

“We’ve gotten used to one-word answers from him and very little conversation.” Connie picked up the cobbler in one hand and the bowl of chilled whipped cream in the other and headed back to the dining room.

Ginger followed her with dessert dishes and clean spoons. “How do you girls stay so slim eating like this every day?”

“Honey, we appreciate the compliment, but Kate is the only skinny one among us.” Betsy giggled. “She’s built like our father. Me and Connie took after Mama.”

Ginger had always wondered what her biological mother and father might have looked like. Her father had been shot in what they called a domestic abuse situation. Her mother was pregnant with her when she was sent to prison for killing him. Six months after Ginger was born, her mother died. She’d never even seen a picture of either of her parents.

She helped Connie in the kitchen all afternoon, and they had supper at the dining room table again. The conversation seemed to center on growing corn for the moonshine business, and evidently they were going to sow it over a lot of ground.

“Just how big is this place?” she asked.