“And who is going to keep her honest? What if she skims from the funds or charges us double for what we take out of the store?” Harper asked.

“Books go to a CPA each quarter so he can pay the taxes for that time period,” Zed said. “If there’s a penny that can’t be accounted for, he’ll let me know.”

“And you’ll be fired.” Harper pointed at Tawny. “What are you doin’ here, anyway? Don’t you have another year of college? Or is it ten more? When do they make you leave that fancy sorority house?”

Tawny had had enough of Harper’s smart mouth. She rose up out of her chair and leaned across the table. “I haven’t been in college since December. I quit and I’ve been working in a coffee shop, doing double shifts when I can to pay the rent on a run-down apartment that I was sharing with two other girls. This job will be a huge step up for me. And for your information, I hated being poor and not knowing if I was going to have enough money to buy enough food until the next payday.”

“What happened?” Dana gasped.

“Holy crap! What did you do to make Mama mad enough to cut you off?” Harper talked over her.

Tawny pushed back her chair and headed to the dessert table. “That would be my business and none of either of y’all’s. I’m taking these brownies to the cabin with me. Anyone got a problem with that?”

“Not if I can have the whole banana pudding,” Harper answered.

“I want the chocolate cake,” Brook said.

With shaking hands Tawny picked up the pan of brownies and the folder with her name on it and left the café. By the time she reached her cabin, her cheeks were wet again with tears, only this time they were borne of anger, not grief.

She had a job, a place to live that beat the hell out of the apartment she’d lived in for the past three months, and food to eat three times a day. She set the brownies on top of the microfridge in the corner and tossed the folder on one of the twin beds. Falling face forward into the other one, she buried her face in a pillow so that no one could hear her cussing so much that it would blister the paint right off the walls.

Damn that Harper for pushing her to the limits like that. Worn out from emotion, she fell asleep and didn’t wake until she heard a gentle knock on the door.

“Who is it?” she yelled.

“It’s me, Zed. I’ve got all this computer stuff ready for you to set up.”

She bounced off the bed, grabbed a washcloth from the bathroom, and quickly ran it over her face before she answered the door. “Holy smoke, Uncle Zed. What is all that? I was expecting a laptop.” The back of his old pickup truck was loaded with a desk, a desktop computer, a file cabinet, and boxes with dates marked on the ends.

“It’s the office. These past few years she kept it all in the corner of my little place at the back of the store. I’m glad to get it out of there, because she spent most of the time cussin’ the machinery when she had to deal with it. I need help bringin’ the desk in. Harper helped me load it, but she’s gettin’ the dining room ready for tomorrow right now. And the file cabinets are full of what Annie called hard copy. I reckon you’ll learn a lot when you go through it.”

Tawny got a firm grip on one end of an old oak desk. “Did this thing come over here on the Mayflower?”

“Naw, honey, but they used the wood from the Mayflower to build it.” Zed’s weak smile was a welcome sight for Tawny’s red eyes. “It actually come out of the little country school that’s out there in the middle of the lake these days. Not long before they dammed up the Neches River to make it, they had a big sale at the school. Annie’s mama bought it and the office chair because they knew they were going to build this place. When Annie got the computer, I fixed a slide-out drawer for the keyboard. She was about your height, so it should be a comfortable fit.”

“Where are we putting it?” Tawny asked as they maneuvered it through the door.

“Here by the door. That’s where she put the special phone line in for the Internet stuff for this whole operation,” Zed answered.

“Dial-up is so slow,” Tawny groaned.

“Don’t know nothin’ about that. Just know that Annie didn’t want no Wi-Fi crap out here because it ruins her idea of gettin’ away from it all. That phone line is for the computer. Your regular phone is over there. Folks that bring cell phones can’t get no reception, so they have to use the plain old telephones in their rooms for whatever they want. Most of them bring charge cards if they want to call home,” Zed said on his way out the door to get the chair. “Come on, girl. This stuff ain’t goin’ to unload itself. You got to run an office out of this room tomorrow mornin’. That means the folks check in and out through here.”

“That also means I have to keep it clean, I suppose?” She groaned again.

“Exactly.” Zed grinned. “You’ve got the cushiest job in the business, so you need a little responsibility. I’ll be bringin’ you all the receipts from the café, and Dana will close out each day and bring you a money bag. You’ll take care of it all and put any cash in the safe that’s in your closet over there. Annie did it that way, too. Then on Saturday mornin’ before noon, you take a deposit to the bank in Tyler.”

“Y’all got things all planned out to the letter. Was she sick a long time?”